bj fogg small habits: the little changes that change everything (houghton mifflin harcourt, 2020) *a top-tier selection
deborah gruenfeld acting with power: why we are more powerful than we think (coin, 2020)
You are reading: Best management books 2020
kate murphy You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters (celadon books, 2020)
this year, covid-19 changed the usual management. Sure, managing remains a matter of getting things done in organizations: breaking down goals into tasks, ensuring employees have the resources and skills to complete tasks, monitoring their progress, and helping them when they get stuck. but where and how people work has changed, radically and overnight in many companies and, in some, perhaps permanently.
These developments have given rise to new needs and stresses that affect the people for whom you are responsible: needs like getting to (or returning to) work safely and stresses like working surrounded by children instead of colleagues . — and thus also affected his performance as a manager.
None of this year’s best business books on management were written for managers per se. but each focuses on capabilities that can help managers identify and address challenges related to the pandemic.
In the year’s best business book on management, Little Habits, Stanford University researcher B.J. Fogg shows how to change your behavior and help others change theirs too, an essential skill at a time when we’re all called to develop new habits. Acting with Power, Deborah Gruenfeld, also at Stanford, explains how an unconventional view of power can allow you to support people in ways that far exceed the limits of your position of authority. And in You’re Not Listening, journalist Kate Murphy offers an unusually insightful exploration of how to actually live up to the dictates of an exhortation we’ve all heard before: “Listen!”
an instagram lesson
in the mid-1990s, b.j. Fogg coined the term captology to describe the persuasive power of computers and then taught his students at Stanford how to use that power. One of them was Mike Krieger, who, with Kevin Systrom, used Fogg’s ideas to turn a failed project into a simple photo-sharing app. They launched Instagram on the iPhone app store in 2010 and, less than two years later, sold it to Facebook for an impressive $1 billion in cash and stock. As it turns out, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg got it cheap: In 2018, Bloomberg estimated Instagram’s worth at $100 billion.
but fogg was playing a bigger game. he didn’t care as much about computers as he cared about people; in fact, from the beginning he warned us about the ethical pitfalls of digital persuasion. at his work, he was trying to figure out how to make behavior change as easy as using instagram (or any app that takes up an inordinate amount of your time these days). Fogg reveals what he discovered in his new self-help book, Little Habits: The Little Changes That Change Everything, written with all the infomercial gloss that the genre implies, and could have a transformative effect on your managerial performance.
fogg’s underlying tone is a model with three variables: b = map. “A behavior occurs,” he explains, “when the three elements of the map (motivation, ability, and prompting) come together at the same moment.” motivation is the desire to exhibit the behavior. skill is the ability to exhibit it. the notice is the signal to display it. according to the equation, if you want to create a positive behavior or solve a negative problem in others, you must analyze all three elements, but in reverse order.
Don’t start with motivating responses like imposing a penalty or glaring at attendees who are late, says Fogg. instead, confirm that there are signs encouraging people to be on time for the meeting. then, make sure that late attendees can make it to the meeting on time. resort to motivation only if the first two items are not causing the desired behavior. “In many cases, you’ll find that your lack of behavior isn’t a motivational problem at all,” she explains. “you can solve a behavior by finding a good indicator or by making the behavior easier to perform.”
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This low-key approach to behavior change epitomizes the advice of small habits. Fogg argues that we make change difficult for ourselves and others by sticking to admonitions like “go big or go home.” when the effort fails, we blame ourselves or others. (I’m thinking of every new year’s resolution, always). instead, stop judging. Break your aspirations down into small behaviors. accept mistakes as discoveries and use them to move forward. “small is powerful. at least when it comes to change,” Fogg declares in the first two sentences of the book.
The Small Habits Methodology is a three-step process that goes back to Fogg’s model of behavior. First, choose an anchor moment: an existing routine or event in your day that tells you the new thing you want to do. Testing this method for myself, I’ve found that you have to have a consistent, strong message, like pouring yourself your morning cup of coffee, or you’ll forget to do whatever it is you want to do.
Second, attach a small behavior. When Fogg wanted to make flossing an ingrained behavior, he started with one tooth. when sarika, a project manager at a fortune 500 company, wanted to start being healthier by making herself breakfast every morning, her little behavior was to turn on the stove, that’s all, just turn it on.
Third, take a moment to celebrate as soon as you complete the new behavior. why celebrate turning on the stove? “Emotions create habits. not repetition. not frequency. not fairy dust. emotions,” fogg writes.
A small habit, like flossing a tooth, can seem inconsequential. But Fogg argues that it is the only consistent and sustainable way to make big changes. “A small action, a small bite, may seem insignificant at first, but it allows you to gain the momentum you need to tackle bigger challenges and progress faster,” she writes.
fogg’s work stands out from the crowd of self-help authors, which frequently becomes infomercial taglines. He founded the Stanford Behavior Design Lab and has taught behavior change to more than 40,000 people. and the methodology outlined in small habits is a tool that any manager can use to improve performance, whether their own or that of a team, which is why I chose it as the best business management book of the year.
power plays
Speaking of little habits, deborah gruenfeld, a social psychologist and joseph mcdonald professor at stanford graduate school of business, describes one about three-quarters of the way through her book, acting with power: why we’re more powerful than we believe. After realizing that she was routinely fixated on negative student reactions and that the habit was coloring her attitude toward teaching, Gruenfeld began spending a few minutes before each class thinking about positive student reactions. students.
“It was a turning point in my life as an educator,” she explains. “It may not always come naturally, even to this day, but it’s foolproof and not hard to do.” To Gruenfeld, this isn’t so much a small habit as an example of choosing love over fear, a technique actors (and managers) can use to “show warmth and caring in a powerful role.”
Many managers are uncomfortable with power. perhaps it is because they occupy a middle ground in which they have power over employees and yet are still subordinate to the power of executives. acting with power offers a means to reframe how we understand power and tap into a source of influence that is available to all of us.
However, if you’re a manager, Gruenfeld’s view of power, which he’s been teaching Stanford MBA students and executives for more than a decade, should have particular resonance. “Power is a role you play in someone else’s story,” she writes. “what makes someone powerful, what makes others willing to comply with their wishes, is the degree to which they are needed…power lives and dies in relationships, in goals and objectives, in settings and in social roles.”
This idea of power as a role you can assume, as an actor would, is particularly liberating (as well as a refreshing alternative to the current fad for authenticity). It allows you to follow Dame Judi Dench’s wonderful advice, “The trick is to take your work seriously, but not yourself seriously,” and avoid the dysfunctions that afflict power-hungry and power-mad people. And it allows you to free yourself from the limitations of positional power and make full use of what Gruenfeld calls “the two faces of power.”
“Power has two faces, no matter who you are,” he explains. “You can highlight it, show it off and remind others who has the upper hand. and you can downplay it, downplay it and remind others how important they are… to use power well, you want to be comfortable showing both [faces].”
ranking, taunting, interrupting, and saying no are all ways to enhance the game. It sounds hostile, but, says Gruenfeld, “the thing to keep in mind is that in a lot of group situations, playing with power is the most generous thing you can do.” groups need managers who play with power when they lack direction or when situations get chaotic.
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Backing off, using self-deprecating humor, and asking for help are all ways to minimize power. Downplaying can be seen as a way to appease others or shirk responsibility, but Gruenfeld explains that “it can also be a way to show respect, build trust, and make others feel safe.”
It is Gruenfeld’s application of these ideas that transforms acting with power from an intriguing read to a better business book for managers. no matter how you’re playing power, like any actor, you have to accept the role. Gruenfeld offers several techniques for doing this, explaining that the central challenge revolves around integrity: “acting with power is striving for integrity by doing whatever it takes to adopt a mindset that makes it possible to do what is responsible.” It also explains how to be more effective in a support role (one that managers should always play), how to overcome performance anxiety, and how to stop power abusers, including bullies, megalomaniacs, and sexual harassers.
If you feel like you’re paralyzed in the effort to cope with disruptions in this pandemic year, acting with power will help you stretch your muscles.
listen
remember when mark zuckerberg went looking for the united states? in 2017, he spent a year traveling the country to “talk to more people about how they live, work and think about the future.” he brought an entourage with him, including a photographer who took pictures of him listening.
“what zuckerberg got right was listening is a challenge,” writes kate murphy, a frequent contributor to the new york times and author of you’re not listening: what you’re missing and why it matters. “where he was wrong, and [what] made him the subject of considerable ridicule online and in the press, was thinking that artificial listening was the same as real listening.”
you’re not listening is a postgraduate course in an art and craft that is essential to good management and yet woefully in short supply. “Listening is the neglected stepchild of communication research, sidelined by research on effective elocution, rhetoric, argumentation, persuasion, and propaganda,” Murphy reports. “Browse the three-volume, 2,048-page International Encyclopedia of Interpersonal Communication and you’ll find only one specific entry to listen to. and you won’t even find listening in the index of the wise manual of interpersonal communication.”
murphy does a good job of remedying this oversight in an engaging, malcolm gladwell-esque approach that has a wide scope. One topic she addresses is the shortcomings of big data and analytics, which have replaced more expensive qualitative research, like focus groups, in marketing. The problem is that a survey or analysis of social media data won’t generate the granular insights that lead to products like Swiffer. The germ of that idea came when a woman in a focus group made up of “super-cleaners” explained that she saved little-used paper towels and reused them to clean the floor with her foot at the end of the day. procter & Gamble listened and created a $500 million brand.
In passages more pertinent to the needs of managers, Murphy provides practical and nuanced advice for becoming a better listener. For example, she explains the difference between switch and support responses (first described by sociologist Charles Derber) and why the latter are so important to good listeners. shift responses move attention away from the speaker and toward the listener; supporting responses encourage the speaker to elaborate.
Effective supportive responses, says Murphy, seek to “understand the speaker’s point of view, not influence it.” open-ended and fill-in-the-blank questions work well in this regard, as long as they are genuinely curious and do not contain hidden assumptions or attempts to subvert the conversation. “good questions don’t start with: ‘don’t you think…?’, ‘don’t you…?’, ‘wouldn’t you agree…?’, and good questions definitely don’t end with ‘ right?'” she explains.
Where you listen is just as important as how you listen. A secluded, soundproof space will rarely be available, but, says Murphy, “you can invite someone over to your office and put your computer to sleep. you can choose quiet restaurants and silence your phone and keep it out of sight. you can find a bench in the park, take a walk down a quiet street, or just duck into a doorway away from the flow of pedestrians to talk.” consciously choosing a setting sends a signal about your willingness to listen.
I found murphy’s advice on silences particularly appropriate, because I’m always too quick to fill them. “As a journalist, it took me too long to realize that I didn’t have to say anything to keep the conversation going,” she writes. “Some of the most interesting and valuable bits of information come not from asking questions, but from keeping my mouth shut.”
And with that in mind, I’ll close mine and give the final word to the person who isn’t listening: “When you interact with someone, their behavior does two things: (1) it helps or hinders your understanding, and (2 ) [that] makes or breaks the relationship. Listening is your best bet on both counts.”
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