This post was written by Tim Stafford from the Research & Technology Executive Council.

Every team in a company seems to have one or two people that can accomplish large complex tasks – product launches, organizational redesign – at a speed and with an ease that outweighs their seniority or formal authority. These people are able to influence a course of events far more effectively than their peers.

Some are able to do so because they are naturally good at what management experts call “soft skills“, but many others have learned how to be influential; this is why those that set education policy have become as keen to develop children’s EQ (their “emotional intelligence quotient“) as their IQ. There are a number of things that successful influencers do that can be replicated, and even formally encouraged within your firm.

Six Ways to Be More Influential Read More »

This post was written by Amy Gallo for our Finance and Strategy Practice.

In CEB View’s last Talent Matters post we discussed how difficult it is to work for a bad boss. But what if, instead of working for one, you are one?

Of course it’s not easy being the boss. Research from CEB’s CLC Human Resources program shows that the three areas that most managers – even great ones – struggle with are evaluating employee performance, providing effective feedback, and turning around underperformance. These are hard things to do and because the way you do them directly affects your team, any missteps are likely to create friction.

Fortunately, the recession seems to have improved many employee-manager relationships but boss-bashing is still a favorite pastime (as proved by last week’s traffic on the first “bad boss” piece). So, how do you know if your employees are just letting off steam or if you are truly difficult to work with? Unfortunately, many bad bosses are the last to know how awful they are to work under. This may be because you aren’t getting the feedback you need, you’re disconnected from your employees or you just aren’t watching out for the signs.

Here are five indications that you may be a worse boss than you thought:

1. Meetings happen without you: If you notice that your employees are getting together to talk about work and not including you, there may be a problem. When employees don’t believe a manager is competent or cares about their work, they are likely to find ways to work around him.
2. Problems blow up before you hear about them: Employees feel comfortable going to good bosses when there is a conflict or an issue because they don’t fear retribution. If you haven’t signaled that you are a partner in solving problems, or worse that you will punish people who bring them to you, you are going to be the last to hear when something negative happens. This greatly hinders your ability to handle problems early on before they become disasters.
3. You don’t know what your employees care about or enjoy doing: What motivates employees is not the same across the board. To inspire your people to go above and beyond, you have to get to know them through open and honest conversations. Struggling managers are often too consumed with themselves to learn more about their people.
4. Your people don’t know where they stand: If you are one of those bosses that complain that your employees are insecure and always asking for your input or approval, ask yourself why they might be behaving that way. All people need effective feedback to do their jobs well. Good bosses don’t hesitate or neglect to tell employees whether they are performing well. Leaving your people in the dark will only lead to disengagement and confusion about what you want them to do.
5. No one disagrees with you: Sometimes the worst bosses just assume everything is going well. They don’t hear about any problems and everyone seems to agree with every brilliant idea they have. It may be less that you are a genius and more that they are terrified of you. Open disagreement is a sign of a healthy and innovative work environment. If everyone is standing around nodding, it’s time to take a hard look at your leadership.

What To Do If It’s You

Read More »

By Anthony Bell

Have you checked out the Harvard Business Review Blogs lately? Our friends at the Sales Executive Council were featured in a three part series focusing on coaching, communication, and engagement.  I think we can learn a bit from the sales realm! Check them out below.

• The Dirty Secret of Effective Sales Coaching: Most sales organizations have invested more time and effort in the past 5 years in improving managers’ coaching of reps than they did in the previous fifty. But coaching is almost worthless when it targets the wrong reps, and SEC research reveals that management targets the wrong reps all the time. Find out who is most worthy of your coaching time.
• Are Your Sales Reps Spending too Much Time in Front of  Customers? : This just in: salespeople are spending less time actually selling to customers than they were just five years ago. But before you pine for the “good old days” when reps spent more time in the customer’s office than in yours, what if having your reps spend less time face-to-face with customers might actually be a good thing? See how the last 5 years have changed the way star performers spend their time.
• When Money Doesn’t Speak Louder than Words: Every sales leader knows that compensation plays an important role in recruiting and retaining the best talent. But what senior executives often don’t realize is that how they communicate about pay can be as important as the pay plan itself. Is your compensation plan fair?  Is it motivating?  Test how confidently you can answer “yes” to these questions.

MREB Members, Check out the Staff Management Topic Center to tackle some of the Market Research function specific challenges around hiring, training and development,  and career planning.

The human brain is wired to have bias. Our pre-conceptions, built from experience and  education, allow us to avoid having to re-evaluate every piece of information we come across;  we can make decisions quickly and with a relatively high degree of accuracy. Biases are normal,  and helpful – until they’re not. When used in substitute of facts, and especially in changing  circumstances, they can be detrimental to accurate decision-making and can actually prevent  the generation of new ideas and theories.

Bias in Biochemistry

Kevin Dunbar studied four biochemistry labs to examine how scientists learn and make discoveries. He believed that the real process is messier than the “scientific process” would have us believe – and he was right. His research on the way that scientists dealt with dissonant data reinforced previous psychological research that found that people are naturally resistant to new information; we search for evidence that confirms what we already believe. For this, you can thank the combined workings of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) – what scientists call the “Oh shit!” circuit, triggered when you see something wrong – and the  dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) – our brain’s “delete key” that suppresses contradictory evidence. Combined, they allow us to identify and overlook “wrong” information.

What counteracts the delete key? Open discussion and debate. Studying lab researchers, Dunbar found that the best new ideas didn’t come from the laboratory, but from the weekly discussions where researchers presented their work – where their pre-conceptions were tested and pushed by their colleagues.

The Market Research Equivalent

This dynamic is no different for market researchers when it comes to insight generation; insight requires discussion and debate of even those observations which seem anomalous. The task for market research leaders: to create an open environment that welcomes new ideas for discussion. Failing to do so can limit insight to the realm of conventional wisdom.

No matter what insight generation method you use, you need to make sure to follow three key steps to remove bias:

1)      Separate the activities of observation and hypothesis generation

2)      Create team support for new ideas

3)      Evaluate all ideas

MREB members, access best-in-class practices for avoiding bias, and other advice on insight generation methods.

A recent post on one of HBR’s blog sites focuses on the idea of “muscle memory” in innovation.  (For anyone wondering, muscle memory, according to Wikipedia, is “a form of procedural memory that involves consolidating a specific motor task into memory through repetition.” As you may have guessed, it’s most often associated with athletics.)

The author made the point that while there is a discipline to innovation, companies often turn innovation efforts over to people with no experience.  All too often, they seek out “creative, right-brained types”… or they look for people who tend to be successful no matter where they are placed in the business.

And what does that mean for us as researchers?  Well, it probably means that we’re going to be number one on the newbie’s speed dial.  Sarcasm aside, Research is the first place that marketers or business leads turn when faced with aggressive growth goals—and rightly so.  Where else can they find the original customer and market insights that will fuel new product innovation?

Whether you’re supporting business partners on radical, break-through innovation, or within-category, incremental ideas, we at the Board can help.  Tap into events, tools, templates, and best practices that have been tested by your peers across companies and industries.  Let us work with you to strengthen your own muscle memory.

• Attend our upcoming Webinar on radical innovation: Facing internal resistance to radical innovation?  Learn how companies have used internal crowdsourcing to build credibility within the organization, share quick wins, and maximize collaboration and idea refinement.
• Tap into our Innovation Support Center: Is there one area in particular where your team needs help?  Check out this section of our Web site.  There are resources for trend identification, ideation and opportunity assessment, concept development, product refinement, and product launch.
• Finally, take a look at some of our research on lead users: We’ve heard from a growing number of members that engaging lead, or highest-value, customers throughout the new product development process can really pay off.  We’ve all struggled to help our organizations in innovation and new product development at some point.  This work can help in a few different areas: identifying and screening for customers who can contribute to new product development, teaching team members and cross-functional partners how to work with progressive customers, and getting actionable product ideas from customers.

Not sure where you need help?  Let me know!  We talk to members about these topics on a daily basis—just consider us your personal trainers. J

Developing a rigorous training program is necessary for success in any endeavor.  The Packers would not have won the Super Bowl last night if they did not have a successful plan for training their team, no matter how good Aaron Rodgers is.  Similarly, the musicians in the New York Philharmonic were not just born with their talent, they have had to train, and continually hone their skills.

The same is true for successful Market Research teams.  Without continued development opportunities, the skill level will stagnate.

But the question becomes, where do you focus the training efforts for the team?  How do you know what skills are most necessary and most lacking?   The skills needed for success in the Market research world are constantly changing and it can be hard to keep up with this evolution.  Imagine how football players would react if every year the goal posts were extended just a little farther.  Thankfully for the NFL, they aren’t, but sometimes in market research it can feel like that is the case.

As we’ve been hearing across the membership, it is no longer enough to only have the core research skills covered on your team.  Strategic consulting and influence skills are no longer a “nice to have,” but a need to have for researchers to excel.  (MREB members can look at our Market Research Talent Development Trends research brief to hear more about the changing needs of market research teams.)

In our discussions with members we continually hear that for training to be effective you must first make researchers understand their skill gaps, and motivate them to want to learn said skills.  In this changing world, it can be difficult to identify individuals’ strengths and weaknesses.  Football players get input from their coaches, teammates and self evaluation.  Market Researchers can similarly turn to their managers and business partners as well as their own self assessment.

Successful ideas where we’ve seen this across the membership include: role playing on business issues with senior level executives, challenging researcher assumptions on insight generation, and 360° feedback with research-specific competencies.

What have you found to be important in the realm of training?  What’s worked for you?  Do you follow the NFL’s example by having a “training camp” or are development efforts more self-led?  Leave a comment below to continue the conversation.

As you put together your plans for 2011, let me suggest a handful of ways we at the Board may be able to support you in the coming year:

1. Build key skills – for yourself or your team.  Most researchers have strong technical and analytical skills.  But business impact is significantly driven by rarer competencies such as consultation, insight, communication, and influence.  (For more information, see our study, Driving Strategic Impact.)  These competencies often develop quite slowly because gaps are undiagnosed and training opportunities are rare.It doesn’t have to be that way.  The Board is proud to offer a new diagnostic tool, the 2011 Research Skills Diagnostic, which allows staff to prioritize areas in which to seek training and development, incorporating individual feedback from business partners.We also continue to offer a robust suite of training workshops on topics such as influencing, communicating, generating insight, and consulting.
2. Develop and communicate foundational knowledge. Leading research functions have refocused attention on building foundational knowledge platforms, not just executing projects.  In addition to sharing best practices and examples, the Board can help you connect with peers who are also working on foundational knowledge and uncover the most successful techniques for socializing knowledge to business partners.
3. Improve insight generation. Insight is very difficult to teach, but there are two key levers research managers can pull to increase insight productivity on their team: (1) hire more experienced, intellectually curious staff (see our profile of the “insight-ready researcher” if you want to pursue this option) and (2) foster an environment within the team that unleashes everyone’s full insight potential.The latter often represents a “quick win” that improves team performance at very little cost.  Read more in our recently revised and expanded resource center on “Analysis and Insight Generation.” Or come to our next “train the trainer” workshop on insight generation, where we will teach you how to customize and deliver a ready-made workshop that will get your team focused on and excited about insight.
4. Get smart on specific research types, such as analytics, competitive intelligence, and NPD/innovation. We just published a white paper on integrating analytics into market research; stay tuned for our next installment, on getting more strategic value out of analytics capabilities.   See also our comprehensive guide to competitive intelligence.  Or, join our upcoming webinar on “radical innovation.”Looking into a new, unfamiliar research type?  Check out our Research Project and Methodology Taxonomy for a quick primer.
5. Stay on top of research trends related to social media. “Social media” remains one of the hottest, most popular topics of interest to market researchers.  Unfortunately, discussion on the subject tends to yield more heat than light.  Review our white paper on what value Research can – and can’t – get from social media today, and join us for a 2011 update with live participation from practitioners and experts.

I do hope one or more of these piques your interest.  Let me know what else you’d like to see from the Board – your feedback drives our agenda.  Here’s to a successful and prosperous 2011!

By Kirsten Robinson

Social media has given consumers a platform to publicly say whatever they want (a sometimes scary thought.) In 2010, Twitter users sent an astounding 25 billion Tweets.

Does one of those tweets have the rare seed to fuel company innovation? Maybe. But there’s an awful lot of dreck.

Starbucks and Dell offer a different and much more active model for finding new ideas. Here are 2½  lessons we learned:

1 Don’t be passive: Communities that thrive over time do more than passively listen. They give participants a psychic reward by demonstrating their impact. I know for myself that nothing is more exciting than seeing my own idea take flight. Let people know (again and again) how important they are. (See Using Engagement Strategies to Increase Research Participation for more.)

2 Don’t be average: Ask a hundred people for new ideas and you’ll get all the average answers. Ask 10,000 people and you’ll get all the average ideas – and a headache trying to find the one spark of innovation. But when communities interact and build on ideas their hit rate goes up dramatically. (Companies like Spigit are fast developing collaborative crowd-sourcing) (To go straight to the source for these rare creative types see Specialist User Screener)

2.5  PR is good: Generating customer and consumer engagement isn’t a big responsibility for Research. But it is a great reason to maintain a community. Both Starbucks and Dell get a lot of PR mileage while extracting some new ideas. Two for ones are a nice deal – and a lot easier to sell to skeptical senior managers. (More companies invest in social media PR than social media research.)

Here are some examples of how companies are using social media to gather consumer knowledge or source customer information: Read More »

By Anthony Bell

Storytelling is a vital career skill, says this executive coach. Be it an investor pitch, interview, or simple elevator introduction, connecting with your audience is essential. When creating your own story for internal clients, you have to grab interest. To do so, you must gain instant attention, engage your audience’s emotions, make it personal, and dare to inspire. The MREB’s sister program from Finance & Strategy highlights four key elements to incorporate into a narrative to get the most impact:

• Reframe how you’re seen
• Make it genuine
• Master the three “I’s” of storytelling
• Break free from a self-defeating story’s trap

Mreb Members,  learn how Continental Airlines uses storytelling as an employee engagement tool or take a look at the seven qualities of good stories and discover how to embed insight into the story narrative.

In April of this year, the 5th annual Iconosphere – Iconoculture’s consumer insights extravaganza – will burst into life at the Eden Roc Renaissance in Miami Beach. Just like in years past, the not-your-mama’s conference focuses solely on consumers, highlighting the shifts that are shaping our culture and most keenly affecting marketers.

Don’t expect the chart-induced eyestrain and soggy pasta that’s de rigueur at typical industry events, though. At Iconosphere, the pool shimmers. The cocktails are sloshier. Best of all, curious people – members, Iconoculture strategists, colleagues – connect over inspiring ideas and shared challenges.

Stripped bare, what the event offers – what’s core to its value for those who attend – is the chance for marketers and researchers to unselfconsciously immerse themselves in the brainier parts of their jobs for a few days. It’s the opportunity to eject from the office, shove off day-to-day bureaucracies, and carefully consider and discuss where the culture is going, what consumers are really thinking, and what to do about it.

We can even sneakily peek at the content debuting in April. A sampling of this year’s sessions include: Media maven-led monitoring of consumers’ relationship with mobile marketing; a close examination of Americans’ post-recession pragmatism; and a tour by our Team India through the twists and turns of the Indian consumer’s retail experience.

The ex-’sphere-ience is not at all conference-as-usual (attendees have been known to crowdsurf). In fact, it actually feels a little more like hot yoga for your consumer insights brain. Except air conditioned. And with cocktail shakers. And no physical exertion. Don’t bring a mat.

If you want to hear more about Iconosphere, contact the Iconoculture team or Register Here