The Trouble with Bright Kids

It's not easy to live up to your fullest potential. There are so many obstacles that can get in the way: bosses that don't appreciate what you have to offer, tedious projects that take up too much of your time, economies where job opportunities are scarce, the difficulty of juggling career, family, and personal goals.

But smart, talented people rarely realize that one of the toughest hurdles they'll have to overcome lies within.

People with above-average aptitudes — the ones we recognize as being especially clever, creative, insightful, or otherwise accomplished — often judge their abilities not only more harshly, but fundamentally differently, than others do (particularly in Western cultures). Gifted children grow up to be more vulnerable, and less confident, even when they should be the most confident people in the room. Understanding why this happens is the first step to righting a tragic wrong. And to do that, we need to take a step back in time.

Chances are good that if you are a successful professional today, you were a pretty bright fifth-grader. You did well in several subjects (maybe every subject), and were frequently praised by your teachers and parents when you excelled.

When I was a graduate student at Columbia, my mentor Carol Dweck and another student, Claudia Mueller, conducted a study looking at the effects of different kinds of praise on fifth-graders. Every student got a relatively easy first set of problems to solve and were praised for their performance. Half of them were given praise that emphasized their high ability ("You did really well. You must be really smart!"). The other half were praised instead for their strong effort ("You did really well. You must have worked really hard!").

Next, each student was given a very difficult set of problems — so difficult, in fact, that few students got even one answer correct. All were told that this time they had "done a lot worse." Finally, each student was given a third set of easy problems — as easy as the first set had been — in order to see how having a failure experience would affect their performance.

Dweck and Mueller found that children who were praised for their "smartness" did roughly 25% worse on the final set of problems compared to the first. They were more likely to blame their poor performance on the difficult problems to a lack of ability, and consequently they enjoyed working on the problems less and gave up on them sooner.
Children praised for the effort, on the other hand, performed roughly 25% better on the final set of problems compared to the first. They blamed their difficulty on not having tried hard enough, persisted longer on the final set of problems, and enjoyed the experience more.

It's important to remember that in Dweck and Mueller's study, there were no mean differences in ability between the kids in the "smart" praise and "effort" praise groups, nor in past history of success — everyone did well on the first set, and everyone had difficulty on the second set. The only difference was how the two groups interpreted difficulty — what it meant to them when the problems were hard to solve. "Smart" praise kids were much quicker to doubt their ability, to lose confidence, and to become less effective performers as a result.

The kind of feedback we get from parents and teachers as young children has a major impact on the implicit beliefs we develop about our abilities — including whether we see them as innate and unchangeable, or as capable of developing through effort and practice. When we do well in school and are told that we are "so smart," "so clever," or "such a good student," this kind of praise implies that traits like smartness, cleverness, and goodness are qualities you either have or you don't. The net result: when learning something new is truly difficult, smart-praise kids take it as sign that they aren't "good" and "smart," rather than as a sign to pay attention and try harder.

Incidentally, this is particularly true for women. As young girls, they learn to self-regulate (i.e., sit still and pay attention) more quickly than boys. Consequently they are more likely to be praised for "being good," and more likely to infer that "goodness" and "smartness" are innate qualities. In a study Dweck conducted in the 1980's, for instance, she found that bright girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up compared to bright boys — and the higher the girls' IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses.

We continue to carry these beliefs, often unconsciously, around with us throughout our lives. And because bright kids are particularly likely to see their abilities as innate and unchangeable, they grow up to be adults who are far too hard on themselves — adults who will prematurely conclude that they don't have what it takes to succeed in a particular arena, and give up way too soon.

Even if every external disadvantage to an individual's rising to the top of an organization is removed — every inequality of opportunity, every unfair stereotype, all the challenges we face balancing work and family — we would still have to deal with the fact that through our mistaken beliefs about our abilities, we may be our own worst enemy.

How often have you found yourself avoiding challenges and playing it safe, sticking to goals you knew would be easy for you to reach? Are there things you decided long ago that you could never be good at? Skills you believed you would never possess? If the list is a long one, you were probably one of the bright kids — and your belief that you are "stuck" being exactly as you are has done more to determine the course of your life than you probably ever imagined. Which would be fine, if your abilities were innate and unchangeable. Only they're not.

No matter the ability — whether it's intelligence, creativity, self-control, charm, or athleticism — studies show them to be profoundly malleable. When it comes to mastering any skill, your experience, effort, and persistence matter a lot. So if you were a bright kid, it's time to toss out your (mistaken) belief about how ability works, embrace the fact that you can always improve, and reclaim the confidence to tackle any challenge that you lost so long ago.

Register now for a free webinar with Heidi Grant Halvorson to learn what successful people do to reach their goals.

What I Learned Building the Apple Store

When I announced that I was leaving Apple to take the reins as CEO of J.C. Penney this month, the business press (and lots of others) began speculating about whether I could replicate the Apple Store's success in such a dramatically different retail setting. One of the most common comments I heard was that the Apple Store succeeded because it carried Apple products and catered to the brand's famously passionate customers. Well, yes, Apple products do pull people into stores. But you don't need to stock iPads to create an irresistible retail environment. You have to create a store that's more than a store to people.

Think about this: Any store has to provide products people want to buy. That's a given. But if Apple products were the key to the Stores' success, how do you explain the fact that people flock to the stores to buy Apple products at full price when Wal-Mart, Best-Buy, and Target carry most of them, often discounted in various ways, and Amazon carries them all — and doesn't charge sales tax!

People come to the Apple Store for the experience — and they're willing to pay a premium for that. There are lots of components to that experience, but maybe the most important — and this is something that can translate to any retailer — is that the staff isn't focused on selling stuff, it's focused on building relationships and trying to make people's lives better. That may sound hokey, but it's true. The staff is exceptionally well trained, and they're not on commission, so it makes no difference to them if they sell you an expensive new computer or help you make your old one run better so you're happy with it. Their job is to figure out what you need and help you get it, even if it's a product Apple doesn't carry. Compare that with other retailers where the emphasis is on cross-selling and upselling and, basically, encouraging customers to buy more, even if they don't want or need it. That doesn't enrich their lives, and it doesn't deepen the retailer's relationship with them. It just makes their wallets lighter.

So the challenge for retailers isn't "how do we mimic the Apple Store" or any other store that seems like a good model. It's a very different problem, one that's conceptually similar to what Steve Jobs faced with the iPhone. He didn't ask, "How do we build a phone that can achieve a two percent market share?" He asked, "How do we reinvent the telephone?" In the same way, retailers shouldn't be asking, "How do we create a store that's going to do $15 million a year?" They should be asking, "How do we reinvent the store to enrich our customers' lives?"

It's not easy, of course. People forget that the Apple Store encountered some bumps along the way. No one came to the Genius Bar during the first years. We even had Evian water in refrigerators for customers to try to get them to sit down and spend time at the bar. But we stuck with it because we knew that face-to-face support was the very best way to help customers. Three years after the Genius Bar launched, it was so popular we had to set up a reservation system.

There isn't one solution. Each retailer will need to find its own unique formula. But I can say with confidence that the retailers that win the future are the ones that start from scratch and figure out how to create fundamentally new types of value for customers.

Why You May Be Blind to a Good Idea (and What to Do About It)

Several years ago I attended a lecture on attention blindness, the basic feature of the human brain that means when we concentrate intensely on one task, we miss almost everything else happening around us. Since we can't see what we can't see, the speaker showed us a video designed to catch us in the act. Six people pass basketballs back and forth and viewers are told to count the number of tosses only between the three wearing white t-shirts, not black. Many people correctly count fifteen tosses. Yet nearly 60 percent fail to see someone in a full gorilla suit stride in among the tossers, then walk away. In some situations with a lot of peer pressure, 90 percent of an audience has missed the gorilla.

I saw the gorilla. I'm dyslexic and knew I wouldn't be able to count tosses on the grainy, confusing video so I didn't try. And that's the lesson of attention blindness. Because I wasn't focused on counting basketballs, I saw what most of my colleagues missed.

A cognitive scientist would say the experiment demonstrates a structural limitation of the human brain. But, for me, the management takeaway is that since we all see selectively but we don't all select the same things, we can leverage the different ways we slice and dice the world. The trick, though, is we can only do this by first accepting that we each have limits: Everything we see means we're missing something else. It's that simple. And impossible to see. So we have to use lessons from the science of attention blindness to construct teams in a way that eliminates group think (where the group rallies around one idea oftentimes at the expense of others that may have been "blind") and yields innovative new ideas they might be missing if they're not actively addressing blind spots.

I see two particularly important practical lessons.

Lesson One: just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there. It was odd seeing the gorilla in a room filled with smart people who were proud of their toss-counting ability. It wasn't easy convincing them they had missed something as dramatic as a gorilla. It required rewinding the tape, disrupting their confidence in their own expertise and ability. To get the same result, a team has to structure its interactions in a way that disrupts attention blindness. One way to do this is by ensuring that outliers are assigned the task of speaking up. I'm cofounder of an organization that develops innovative learning practices and technologies. When our team meets, we put on the agenda: "What are we missing?" Someone is then randomly selected to begin the discussion of that agenda item. And it can be anyone. Don't rule out the cranky person, the intern, or the assistant who usually just takes notes, or the new guy who "doesn't get it." The puzzled person may be the only one who can see what the pros miss.

Lesson Two: I'll count — if you take care of that gorilla. This principle acknowledges that, no matter how we try, no one person ever sees the whole picture. Our brains aren't built that way. But as a group, we can select the right partners and the right tools to distribute expertise and assignments to compensate for what we lack. My organization calls this method "collaboration by difference." Or, as one member of our quirky team likes to say, difference isn't our deficit, it's our operating system.

Like most organizations, in ours we need to keep an eye on the bottom line and we need to see the big gorilla. So we also have meetings designed to see what we're missing. Each member has the floor for twenty minutes. They present a problem for others to tackle, then shut up, and it's a free-for-all, with everyone else pitching in ideas. The others might not have a clue about the progress, methods, or solutions being worked on already. We use this method whether we're talking about technical matters such as performance speed on a state-of-the-art Drupal site in development, workplace issues such as reconfiguring office space, or grant or program opportunities. The point is that each project manager proposes a topic in order to see what others not charged with counting the basketballs are seeing and what they might be missing.

The downside of these methods based on disrupting our attention blindness is they can derail you when you are speeding efficiently along. On the other hand, they can serve as an early-warning signal when you're heading fast in exactly the wrong direction.

Facebook Is Making Us Miserable

When Facebook was founded in 2004, it began with a seemingly innocuous mission: to connect friends. Some seven years and 800 million users later, the social network has taken over most aspects of our personal and professional lives, and is fast becoming the dominant communication platform of the future.

But this new world of ubiquitous connections has a dark side. In my last post, I noted that Facebook and social media are major contributors to career anxiety. After seeing some of the comments and reactions to the post, it's clear that Facebook in particular takes it a step further: It's actually making us miserable.

Facebook's explosive rate of growth and recent product releases, such as the prominent Newsticker, Top Stories on the newsfeed, and larger photos have all been focused on one goal: encouraging more sharing. As it turns out, it's precisely this hyper-sharing that is threatening our sense of happiness.

In writing Passion & Purpose, I monitored and observed how Facebook was impacting the lives of hundreds of young businesspeople. As I went about my research, it became clear that behind all the liking, commenting, sharing, and posting, there were strong hints of jealousy, anxiety, and, in one case, depression. Said one interviewee about a Facebook friend, "Although he's my best friend, I kind-of despise his updates." Said another "Now, Facebook IS my work day." As I dug deeper, I discovered disturbing by-products of Facebook's rapid ascension — three new, distressing ways in which the social media giant is fundamentally altering our daily sense of well-being in both our personal and work lives.

First, it's creating a den of comparison. Since our Facebook profiles are self-curated, users have a strong bias toward sharing positive milestones and avoid mentioning the more humdrum, negative parts of their lives. Accomplishments like, "Hey, I just got promoted!" or "Take a look at my new sports car," trump sharing the intricacies of our daily commute or a life-shattering divorce. This creates an online culture of competition and comparison. One interviewee even remarked, "I'm pretty competitive by nature, so when my close friends post good news, I always try and one-up them."

Comparing ourselves to others is a key driver of unhappiness. Tom DeLong, author of Flying Without a Net, even describes a "Comparing Trap." He writes, "No matter how successful we are and how many goals we achieve, this trap causes us to recalibrate our accomplishments and reset the bar for how we define success."And as we judge the entirety of our own lives against the top 1% of our friends' lives, we're setting impossible standards for ourselves, making us more miserable than ever.

Second, it's fragmenting our time. Not surprisingly, Facebook's "horizontal" strategy encourages users to log in more frequently from different devices. My interviewees regularly accessed Facebook from the office, at home through their iPads, and while out shopping on their smartphones. This means that hundreds of millions of people are less "present" where they are. Sketching out a mind-numbing presentation for the board meeting? Perhaps it's time to reply to your messages. Stuck in traffic? It's time to browse your newsfeed. Recounted one interviewee, "I almost got hit by a car while using Facebook crossing the street."

Leaving the risk of real physical harm aside, the issue with this constant "tabbing" between real-life tasks and Facebook is what economists and psychologists call "switching costs," the loss in productivity associated with changing from one task to another. Famed author Dr. Srikumar Rao attributes mindfulness over multitasking as one of his ten steps to happiness at work. He argues that constant distractions lead to late and poor-quality output, negatively impacting our sense of self-worth.

Last, there's a decline of close relationships. Gone are the days where Facebook merely complemented our real-life relationships. Now, Facebook is actually winning share of our core, off-line interactions. One participant summed it up simply: "We Facebook chat instead of meeting up. It's easier."

As Facebook adds new features such as video chat, it is fast becoming a viable substitute for meetings, relationship building, and even family get-togethers. But each time a Facebook interaction replaces a richer form of communication — such as an in-person meeting, a long phone call, or even a date at a restaurant — people miss opportunities to interact more deeply than Facebook could ever accommodate. As Facebook continues to add new features to help us connect more efficiently online, the battle to maintain off-line relationships will become even more difficult, which will impact their overall quality, especially in the long-run. Facebook is negatively affecting what psychology Professor Jeffrey Parker refers to as "the closeness properties of friendship."

So, what should we do to avoid these three traps? Recognizing that "quitting" Facebook altogether is unrealistic, we can still take measures to alter our usage patterns and strengthen our real-world relationships. Some useful tactics I've seen include blocking out designated time for Facebook, rather than visiting intermittently throughout the day; selectively trimming Facebook friends lists to avoid undesirable ex-partners and gossipy coworkers; and investing more time in building off-line relationships. The particularly courageous choose to delete Facebook from their smartphones and iPads, and log off the platform entirely for long stretches of time.

Is Facebook making you miserable? What other tips can you share?

This post is part of a series of blog posts by and about the new generation of purpose-driven leaders.

On Social Media Becoming Social Business

For a clue to social media's future, we need not look much further than Washington. On the one hand, you have "Weinergate," former NY Senator Anthony Weiner's Twitter fiasco, which was essentially user error. He failed to negotiate the thin line between digital communication and social communication, between private and public.

On the other hand you have President Obama's announcement that he will do his own Tweeting. I'm fairly confident that while Obama may be the one that hits the "Tweet" button, it's highly unlikely that his tweets will go out into the wild without planning and, for the lack of a better word, design. He's no Anthony Weiner.

These two events signal the shift that's coming. The age of social media as something spontaneous that reflects how we behave in the real world (the Weiner approach) is coming to an end. We are entering an age of social business: a purposeful, planned, orchestrated, and integrated way of doing business in a social context which may feel personal to the outside world but combine complexities internally within organizations that will need navigating. As further evidence to the shift, one can look to technology for yet another clue.

Over the past several years, forward-thinking companies have begun to understand the value of monitoring conversations, so they have purchased software licenses from platforms like Radian 6. Recently, Enterprise software behemoth Salesforce acquired the startup, sending the signal that listening to social conversations is only one slice of the bigger pie for business. The true opportunity lies in scaling and operationalizing "social". If the next phase of social media is operating as a scalable social organization or business, then expect to see an explosion of activity in the following areas:

Organizational Design: While social media is focused on parts of an organization or business where communications and marketing demand social media tactics, a social business is redesigned as it moves through key phases of its evolution. All business functions have to undergo several iterations of change. Looking at your organization from a social business lens means looking at it more holistically. For further proof here, we can look to Facebook, where business and brand pages deal not only with customer "likes" but also with complaints and attacks from activist groups such as Greenpeace. Corporate Facebook pages are great examples of the need for marketing, PR, customer service, and even HR to all figure out how to work together because users on Facebook don't make the distinction behind which department is running what. To them, a company page represents all departments.

Social Business Intelligence: The rise of social media led to a gold rush in technology solutions, which allowed organizations to eavesdrop on conversations happening across multiple social ecosystems and digital public spaces such as the blogosphere, message boards, and Facebook. Organizations that have become accustomed to listening in on conversations are now positioned to take the next step and convert listening into organization-wide business intelligence. Dell, for example, has a "social command center", a baby step in the emerging area of social intelligence. Socially intelligent organizations will not only be able to adapt to conditions in their environment, but they will eventually be able to predict and plan for future scenarios.

Cultures of Collaboration, Co-Creation & Shared Value: Perhaps the most significant recent business case, which illustrates the business side of social, comes from a notoriously anti-social brand. When Apple first designed the iPhone, it did not plan for phones to be jailbroken and applications to be developed ad hoc, but that's what happened. The App Store was born by an early understanding that certain aspects were out of Apple's control and therefore a system needed to be planned and designed if Apple were to extract value in the long run. The end result is what's commonly known in the business world as an ecosystem in which value is entered into it and extracted by multiple stakeholders for mutual gain. An ecosystem, by definition, is sustainable.

The tenuous relationship between social media and social business represents a chasm that must be bridged. On one hand, the public desires authentic interactions in social spaces from real people. There is now an expectation for real-time response. On the other, a business or organization requires a system to be in place that coordinates activities. In short, it means knowing that Obama is pressing the Tweet button at times, but making sure he's not Tweeting anything inappropriate. The shift to come is moving from a focus on external media consumption to the internalization and business integration of what it means to become social or connected. Organizations that integrate social into how they do business will embrace social as a layer that's woven into the fabric of each business function over time. In the era of social business, external media will always play a role, but it will be the tip of the iceberg.

To Get Paid What You're Worth, Know Your Disruptive Skills

I'm not paid what I'm worth."

Who hasn't said this at least once?

I certainly have.

But if we subscribe to classical economics — which says that the price paid for any given service is the price at which the quantity supplied equals the quantity demanded — aren't we paid precisely what we're worth? And if we still believe we're trading at a discount to our intrinsic value, is it possible to change the market's mind?

In a recent conversation with a colleague of mine about our respective strengths, he identified as one of my strong points an ability to connect the dots between people and ideas, where others see no possible connection. Developmental psychologist Howard Gardner would describe this as searchlight intelligence, an intelligence that readily discerns connections across spheres and sees opportunities to cross-pollinate. My colleague then surprised me by wondering aloud, "I don't understand why you don't value what is such an apparent strength."

I do value my ability to think across silos, I countered, but it's true that I value my skill of building a financial model more, because it was so painstaking to acquire.

A tendency to obfuscate our strengths should not be surprising. If we've really applied ourselves to achieving competency, we are justifiably proud. Yet we often overlook our best skills — our innate talents — simply because we perform them without even thinking. As publisher Malcolm Forbes put it, "Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are."

As we look to close the gap between what we're paid and what we're worth, there is a lesson to be learned from the stock market. In my experience, the stocks that trade at fair value or even a premium to their peers are those that know what kind of stock they are, and then deliver, whether "disruptive innovation — emerging growth," "sustaining innovation — best-of-breed," or "being-disrupted — but dividend-paying."

Not surprisingly, the stocks that lead with their unique or disruptive capabilities command the highest absolute multiples. The market historically rewards "disruptive innovation — emerging growth" stocks with multiples of 30x or more. The market pays top dollar, applying a premium multiple to disruptive innovations, because the odds for disruptors are much better — 6x greater in terms of success, 20x greater in terms of revenue opportunity, as Clayton M. Christensen wrote in The Innovator's Dilemma.

Translating this to our careers, when we proffer to the marketplace a disruptive skill set, focusing on our distinctive innate talents rather than 'me-too' skills, we are more likely to achieve success and increase what we earn. For example, consider the outcomes for two presidential candidates: on the one hand, Mitt Romney, who highlighted his political views rather than his business acumen; on the other, Bill Clinton, who understood that, as smart as the former Rhodes scholar is, his real skill was interpersonal intelligence. In my own case, I may not get paid top dollar if I'm hired to sequester myself every day, constructing financial models: I build models well, but not remarkably so. But if I lead with my unique skill set of searchlight intelligence, following with "can build a model/value a company," the calculus changes dramatically.

We all want to get paid what we believe we are worth, which may be even more than what we currently estimate. The trick then is to lead with unique or disruptive skills, offering the hard-won skills as a kicker. When you know exactly what your value proposition is, rather than perpetually trading at a discount, you'll command the premium you deserve.

Better Time Management Is Not the Answer

Managers tell us all the time they have "a time management problem." Their days, they say, are often hijacked by unplanned events, interruptions, crises — matters that can't be ignored. They go to work planning to do certain things as a boss and at day's end they realize they've done none of it.

"How do I cope?" they want to know. "How do I do what I'm supposed to do in the middle of chaos? When do I do the work of being a boss — things like working toward goals, developing people, building a team, and creating and sustaining a network?"

Does this sound familiar? Do you have this kind of time problem?

The answer isn't what you probably expect or hope to hear. Even if you push off less important demands, delegate better, and are stingy in your expenditure of time — all good time management practices — you would still have a problem.

The reality is, management is fragmented and reactive by nature. The problem isn't you, and it's not a lack of time management skills. It's management itself. It's a problem even for senior managers. Those who head major business units also struggle to stay ahead of daily events.

Great bosses have discovered the right approach. They don't focus merely on managing their time better. They don't think about their work as comprising two different parts — handling unexpected, daily problems versus doing what they should do as bosses. They don't try to do their daily work and also the work of management. Instead, they use the chaos — unplanned events, crises, obligations — to do managerial work. To do this, they use an approach we call "Prep-Do-Review" in every activity they undertake.

In a nutshell, Prep-Do-Review calls on you to think of every activity not as one step — doing — but as three steps: preparing to act, acting, and then reviewing the outcome. It works this way:

• Prep: Before you do anything, prepare. Ask yourself questions like these: What am I going to do? Why — what's my goal or purpose? How will I do it? Who else will be involved or affected?
• Do: Do what you prepared to do.
• Review: When you're done, think about what you did and what happened. What did you learn? How would you do it differently next time? (Don't assume the right lesson is obvious; it often is not.)

The wisdom of Prep-Do-Review may be simple and obvious, but how often do you just react to what's in front of you? In the name of time management, how often do you deal with something that's come up in the quickest way possible, just to resolve it and get it out of the way so you can go on to what you're supposed to do as a boss?

Great managers use Prep-Do-Review (whether they call it that or not) to convert every activity into a means of pursuing some management purpose — to make progress toward a goal, to develop someone, to reaffirm work standards, to strengthen bonds among members of their team, to model the behavior they want, and on and on. In their minds, every activity contains some seed of progress, and Prep-Do-Review is how they find that seed and nurture it .They use a crisis to reconnect with an important colleague in their network. They use a customer service problem to begin working through a broader issue with their boss. They use a "pointless" meeting as an opportunity to brief a colleague during the break about a change in plans. They use a production problem to develop the skills of a key employee.

If you don't Prep — spend a a minute or two, or even just a few seconds — before dealing with a problem, you won't see the possibilities in what you thought was some mundane activity. If you then don't carry out the action as planned, and if you don't step back afterwards to crystallize what you and others learned, you'll spend your days struggling to get to your work as a manager.

Make Prep-Do-Review a practice that you consistently, systematically, and routinely pursue. By using this simple but powerful approach, you can convert many of the activities that crowd your days into management tools for moving your people forward individually and as a group.