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Have you ever worked hard to improve a valuable skill and made real progress, only to have your development go unnoticed by the people who told you that you needed to improve? Perhaps this led you to look for a new job. Or maybe you’re a manager who’s been disappointed by poor performance and concluded that your low-performing employees are simply over-entitled? So you gave up on trying to help them improve and vented your frustration with colleagues behind closed doors.
Both of these commonplace experiences point to problems caused by a fixed mindset, in which we find it hard to believe that people can change. These examples illustrate the phenomenon of the self-fulfilling prophecy, where a belief triggers behaviors that make that belief more likely to come true.
Self-fulfilling prophecies can wreak havoc in the workplace. Leaders’ attitudes about employees affect the ways they treat them, which in turn affect the employees’ behaviors and performance. Researchers who investigated managers with a fixed mindset (who believe that employees’ attributes are innate and unchangeable) and those with a growth mindset (who believe that people can change) found that those who see employees’ capabilities as fixed were disinclined to expend effort helping them develop and improve. After all, why waste your time on a lost cause when what you see is all you’ll ever get? On the other hand, they found that managers who believe that employees are capable of growth were more likely to engage in coaching behaviors, like giving constructive feedback, supporting them in taking on new challenges, and expressing confidence in their capacity to learn and develop.
Believing that employees can change doesn’t just make managers more willing and able to coach; evidence also suggests that it makes them more accurate judges of improvements or drops in performance. The good news is that cultivating a growth mindset is possible with coaching or training.
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1. Address the “human side” systematically. A formal approach for managing change — beginning with the leadership team and then engaging key stakeholders and leaders — should be developed early, and adapted often as change moves through the organization
2. Start at the top. Because change is inherently unsettling for people at all levels of an organization, when it is on the horizon, all eyes will turn to the CEO and the leadership team for strength, support, and direction.
3. Involve every layer. As transformation programs progress from defining strategy and setting targets to design and implementation, they affect different levels of the organization. Change efforts must include plans for identifying leaders throughout the company and pushing responsibility for design and implementation down, so that change “cascades” through the organization.
4. Make the formal case. Individuals are inherently rational and will question to what extent change is needed, whether the company is headed in the right direction, and whether they want to commit personally to making change happen. They will look to the leadership for answers. The articulation of a formal case for change and the creation of a written vision statement are invaluable opportunities to create or compel leadership-team alignment.
Three steps should be followed in developing the case: First, confront reality and articulate a convincing need for change. Second, demonstrate faith that the company has a viable future and the leadership to get there. Finally, provide a road map to guide behavior and decision making.
5. Create ownership. Leaders of large change programs must overperform during the transformation and be the zealots who create a critical mass among the work force in favor of change.
6. Communicate the message. Too often, change leaders make the mistake of believing that others understand the issues, feel the need to change, and see the new direction as clearly as they do. The best change programs reinforce core messages through regular, timely advice that is both inspirational and practicable. Communications flow in from the bottom and out from the top, and are targeted to provide employees the right information at the right time and to solicit their input and feedback. Often this will require overcommunication through multiple, redundant channels.
7. Assess the cultural landscape. Successful change programs pick up speed and intensity as they cascade down, making it critically important that leaders understand and account for culture and behaviors at each level of the organization.
8. Address culture explicitly. Once the culture is understood, it should be addressed as thoroughly as any other area in a change program. Leaders should be explicit about the culture and underlying behaviors that will best support the new way of doing business, and find opportunities to model and reward those behaviors.
9. Prepare for the unexpected. Fed by real data from the field and supported by information and solid decision-making processes, change leaders can then make the adjustments necessary to maintain momentum and drive results.
10. Speak to the individual. Change is both an institutional journey and a very personal one. People spend many hours each week at work; many think of their colleagues as a second family. Individuals (or teams of individuals) need to know how their work will change, what is expected of them during and after the change program, how they will be measured, and what success or failure will mean for them and those around them.
Most leaders contemplating change know that people matter. It is all too tempting, however, to dwell on the plans and processes, which don’t talk back and don’t respond emotionally, rather than face up to the more difficult and more critical human issues. But mastering the “soft” side of change management needn’t be a mystery.
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(Paul: I must point out one paragraph from the article we all disagree with:
There are many examples of successful people dropping out of school or foregoing a formal education, but it is clear that they never stop learning. And reading is a key part of their success.)
Want to know one habit ultra-successful people have in common?
They read. A lot.
In fact, when Warren Buffett was once asked about the key to success, he pointed to a stack of nearby books and said, “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”
And he’s not alone. Here are just a few top business leaders and entrepreneurs who make reading a major part of their daily lifestyle:
- Bill Gates reads about 50 books per year, which breaks down to 1 per week
- Mark Cuban reads more than 3 hours every day
- Elon Musk is an avid reader and when asked how he learned to build rockets, he said “I read books.”
- Mark Zuckerberg resolved to read a book every 2 weeks throughout 2015
- Oprah Winfrey selects one of her favorite books every month for her Book Club members to read and discuss
And these aren’t just isolated examples. A study of 1200 wealthy people found that they all have reading as a pastime in common.
But successful people don’t just read anything. They are highly selective about what they read, opting to be educated over being entertained.
If reading as a pathway to success isn’t enough to get you motivated, consider these health benefits of reading: Reading has been shown to help prevent stress, depression, and dementia, while enhancing confidence, empathy, decision-making, and overall life satisfaction.
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("I put the 'StarShot' article here because I believe it presents a BIG IDEA - the same opportunities for discovery as FRIB although in a different environment. As far as this article is concerned there is no indication of a university partner for success. They need to have a connection to a multidisciplinary institution that can use revolving teams to support this mission. Make that institution MSU and, as with FRIB, the risks are high now but the rewards are high later." Paul)
- The majority of power/energy used for this doesn’t come from one-time-only use rocket fuel, but rather from lasers, which can be recharged.
- The masses of the starchip spaceships are incredibly low, and so can be accelerated to very fast (close to the speed-of-light) speeds.
- And with the advent of miniaturization in electronics and ultra-strong, lightweight materials, we can actually create usable devices and send them light years away.
The idea isn’t new, but the advent of new technology — both currently available and expected to be available in the next two or three decades — makes this a seemingly realistic possibility.
Many serious scientists are on board with this concept as well, as the technology is developing rapidly. As nanomaterials become better and better, it’s realistic to expect we can build a one-gram sail that’s a square meter in surface area, capable of standing up to the laser fire and reflecting it. One of the great recent advances in laser technology is the ability to couple many small lasers into a large laser array, allowing them to all focus on a single target. Further improvements in laser power and collimation mean that the amount of acceleration a laser can cause has improved greatly since the 1990s as well.
It sounds almost too good to be true, and that’s because there are some disadvantages that have not been addressed at all. These include:
- The fact that the laser array is planning on being built on the ground, not in space. This is easier to maintain and create and is about 50 times cheaper, but the atmosphere disperses light, and therefore only a small percentage of the light will hit the starchip. Less light means less acceleration, and that means slower speeds for the voyage, making this “starshot” less attractive.
- The fact that striking an unsupported sail-like structure with any sort of flux, whether a laser sail or a solar sail, will develop angular momentum and begin to rotate. It’s unclear how to keep a sail like this from spiraling and spinning out-of-control without a (heavy) stabilizing mechanism on board.
- Even if you did reach your destination, you couldn’t slow down or transmit information back to Earth. Right now, the power available to such a small starchip would be so small that it couldn’t transmit anything useful that would be detectable by those of us back on Earth.
- And finally, the cost factor: $100 million might seem like a lot, but is less than 1% of the cost needed to build and execute such a project, much less to develop the necessary technology, which still hasn’t been done.
- There are some hopes to address some of these issues, but right now the science on how to do so is unclear at best.
This last challenge might be the greatest of all. According to planetary scientist Bruce Betts:
- This could be the greatest problem facing the project: are we simply spending tens of billions of dollars to deliver ~1-gram artifacts from Earth into deep space, never to be heard from again?
- Which isn’t to say let’s not do this, but rather to say let’s be honest about the challenges facing us. Because if we’re going to do it, we’d better do it right and make this effort as meaningful as possible. This is an amazing possibility and one that needs to be explored further, but $100 million and our current, greatest technologies won’t even begin to get us there.
- Last year, a team of scientists wrote a white paper on how an advanced laser array could combine with the solar sail concept to create a “laser sail”-based spacecraft. In theory, we could use current technology and extraordinarily low-mass spaceships (i.e., “starchips”) to reach the nearest stars in a single human lifetime.
“If you could fly to a forest, and you could see a tree fall, but you can’t mention to anyone, did it really matter?”
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