The Power of Moments

by Chip Heath

  The striking change came in the second group. The participants were shown the red slides, and as described above, the three confederates continually called them “orange.” This time, though, the participants stayed strong! They defied the majority, labeling 17 out of 20 slides (on average) as red.

  Note that they were brave even though they hadn’t practiced courage themselves. They’d only witnessed it. Brave but Wrong Guy was willing to speak up for himself—even though he was mistaken about the color. That act of dissent bolstered the other participants’ resolve. As the researchers wrote, “exposure to a dissenting minority view, even when that view is in error, contributes to independence.”

  The bad news here is that our natural instinct is to cave to the majority opinion. If everyone says the red card is orange, we think we must be wrong, and we call it orange, too.

  The good news is that if even one person is brave enough to defy the majority, we are emboldened. We’re not alone anymore. We’re not crazy. And we feel we can call red “red.”

  In short, courage is contagious. From historic protests to everyday acts, from the civil rights movement to an employee asking a tough question, this is the lesson we’ve learned: It is hard to be courageous, but it’s easier when you’ve practiced, and when you stand up, others will join you.

  Think of it: Your moment of courage might be a defining moment for someone else—a signal to them that red is red, that wrong is wrong, and that it can be righted if we stand, together, against it.

  MOMENTS OF PRIDE

  THE WHIRLWIND REVIEW

  * * *

  1. Moments of pride commemorate people’s achievements. We feel our chest puff out and our chin lift.

  2. There are three practical principles we can use to create more moments of pride: (1) Recognize others; (2) Multiply meaningful milestones; (3) Practice courage. The first principle creates defining moments for others; the latter two allow us to create defining moments for ourselves.

  3. We dramatically underinvest in recognition.

  • Researcher Wiley: 80% of supervisors say they frequently express appreciation, while less than 20% of employees agree.

  4. Effective recognition is personal, not programmatic. (“Employee of the Month” doesn’t cut it.)

  • Risinger at Eli Lilly used “tailored rewards” (e.g., Bose headphones) to show his team: I saw what you did and I appreciate it.

  5. Recognition is characterized by a disjunction: A small investment of effort yields a huge reward for the recipient.

  • Kira Sloop, the middle school student, had her life changed by a music teacher who told her that her voice was beautiful.

  6. To create moments of pride for ourselves, we should multiply meaningful milestones—reframing a long journey so that it features many “finish lines.”

  • The author Kamb planned ways to “level up”—for instance “Learn how to play ‘Concerning Hobbits’ from The Fellowship of the Ring”—toward his long-term goal of mastering the fiddle.

  7. We can also surface milestones that would have gone unnoticed.

  • What if every member of a youth sports team got a “before-and-after” video of their progress?

  • Number-heavy organizational goals are fine as tools of accountability, but smart leaders surface more motivational milestones en route to the target.

  8. Moments when we display courage make us proud. We never know when courage will be demanded, but we can practice to ensure we’re ready.

  • The protesters involved in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins didn’t just show courage, they rehearsed it.

  9. Practicing courage lets us “preload” our responses.

  • Gentile’s approach to ethics says we usually know WHAT is right but don’t know HOW to act.

  10. Courage is contagious; our moments of action can be a defining moment for others.

  Clinic 4

  Boss Has Flash of Insight: I’m a Jerk

  The situation: The CFO of a company—let’s call him Mark—has just reviewed the results of his 360 feedback. The results are not good.

  Mark knows that he is not well loved in the company. He prides himself on being a tell-it-like-it-is manager. “Leadership is not a popularity contest,” he’ll say. Even so, he is shocked by the feedback. People don’t see him as a no-nonsense leader. They see him as a total jerk. He rarely listens, they said. He interrupts people frequently to insert his own views. He is dismissive of other people’s opinions. And he never apologizes or admits mistakes. One quote in particular stings him: “Mark is currently the only C-level executive in this firm who has no hope of being CEO, for the simple reason that being CEO is the ultimate leadership role and no one would follow Mark.”

  The desire: Mark has tripped over the truth. (The 360 feedback provided a [1] clear insight, [2] compressed in time, and [3] discovered by the audience itself—that is, him.) The defensiveness he felt when he first started reading the feedback—“this is just sour grapes from jealous colleagues”—had crumbled by the end. He realizes his colleagues are right. He’s been acting like a jerk. And he sees, too, that he has no hope of becoming a CEO—at his company or anywhere else—until he fixes himself. So he’ll change. But how?

  How Do We Create a Defining Moment?

  What’s the moment? There’s no natural moment here, and that’s part of the problem. The famous executive coach Marshall Goldsmith said that some of his clients do succeed in reforming their bad behavior—but no one notices! His clients had already imprinted themselves on their colleagues as jerks. So Goldsmith learned to press his clients to set up a meeting with their colleagues at which they would apologize for their behavior, promise to change, and ask their colleagues’ help to do so. Taking a cue from Goldsmith, Mark schedules a meeting where he does exactly that. That’s a defining moment—it marks a transition from the “old me” to the “new me.”

  Add ELEVATION:

  1: Mark’s meeting is not a peak—there’s not much positive emotion involved. Nevertheless, the raw confessional nature of the meeting (a) raises the stakes and (b) breaks the script, which are two of the three traits of a moment of elevation.

  Add INSIGHT:

  1: Trip over the truth. The key moment of insight here is Mark’s receipt of the 360 feedback—that is the first defining moment that leads to a second (the meeting).

  2: Stretch for insight. The heart of the meeting is Mark’s promise to reinvent himself. That’s a risk for him—he wants to change but doesn’t know if he’s capable of it. (And frankly, his colleagues are skeptical.) Whether he succeeds or not, he will learn something about himself.

  Add PRIDE:

  1: Mark should take pride in the meeting itself—it takes courage to hold himself accountable for his own bad behavior. Beyond the meeting, he can lay the groundwork for future moments of pride.

  2: Practice courage. Even as Mark asks for his colleagues’ help, he knows it will be hard for them to speak up. It’s hard to call someone a jerk to his face. Imagine if Mark equips his colleagues with a language of criticism: “I called you together today because I want this to be the moment when I stop acting like Old Mark—the jerk who doesn’t listen—and start acting like New Mark. I’m going to try my hardest, but if you catch me acting like Old Mark, I’d really appreciate you calling me out.” Why would that language help? Recall Mary Gentile’s research about ethically troubling situations. Her contention is that what’s hard about being courageous is not knowing what to do but rather knowing how to respond. Because of that, it’s useful to preload our responses so we’ll be ready in the moment. With the “Old Mark/New Mark” language, he is helping his colleagues preload their responses to the moments when he slips into his old behavior. (Hat tip to Tasha Eurich for this idea.)

  3: Multiply milestones. Imagine if Mark sets a goal that he wants to take part in 10 meetings in a row without interrupting anyone—and asks his colleagues to police him. That might be a way to introduce some playfulness to an otherwise frau
ght situation, and if he hits the goal, it would be a moment well worth celebrating.

  Add CONNECTION:

  1: Deepen ties. Mark’s meeting is a great example of showing vulnerability, which is a prerequisite to intimacy. When his colleagues see him lowering his guard, it allows them to see him as a human being with flaws—not a wholesale jerk.

  2: Create shared meaning. The meeting provides a synchronizing moment; all his colleagues witness it together. It sharpens the demarcation point and reinforces the seriousness of Mark’s pledge.

  Final reflections: The key insight here is that an unpopular leader needs to create a moment. As Goldsmith says, even if a leader successfully changes his behavior, it might not fix his relationship problems, because his colleagues might not notice. The moment creates a reset point.

  Moments of ELEVATION

  Moments of INSIGHT

  Moments of PRIDE

  Moments of CONNECTION

  Introduction to Moments of Connection

  * * *

  Think about the many defining moments we’ve encountered so far: Signing Day, the “reverse wedding” ceremony, the Trial of Human Nature, the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins, the CLTS open-defecation intervention, and the John Deere First Day Experience. As you know, they are moments of elevation, insight, and pride. But they are also social moments. They’re more memorable because others are present.

  Moments of connection deepen our relationships with others: You’ve known someone for only 24 hours, but you’ve already told them some of your deepest secrets. You endure a grueling experience with others and emerge with bonds that will never break. Your marriage hits a rocky patch—until one day your partner does something so thoughtful, you can’t imagine loving anyone else.

  Not all social moments are defining moments, of course. Think of the last PowerPoint presentation you witnessed at work during a team meeting—not, we predict, a peak moment of connection. So what is it about certain moments that strengthen relationships? And how do we create more of them?

  We’ll examine group relationships first: teams in organizations trying to rediscover their purpose, worshippers engaging in sacred rituals, and groups of friends laughing. (After the next chapter, you’ll never think about laughter the same way again.) When members of groups grow closer, it’s because of moments that create shared meaning (Chapter 10).

  Then in Chapter 11 we’ll study personal relationships, including the work of one psychologist who has identified a kind of “secret sauce” for effective relationships of all kinds: husbands and wives, businesses and clients, teachers and parents, doctors and patients. We’ll also encounter the seemingly unthinkable: strangers who become fast friends in 45 minutes, as a result of following a carefully structured series of questions (which you can download for yourself).

  In this final part of the framework, we’ll study the unforgettable moments that connect us together.

  10

  Create Shared Meaning

  1.

  In 1998, Sonia Rhodes left the hospital with her recovering father, who had spent eight days there being treated for severe gastric bleeding. She felt profoundly grateful to the doctors and nurses who had saved his life. Yet she was unsettled by the experience he’d received as a patient.

  He shared his cramped room with a stranger. Hospital staffers cycled in and out of the room, often without saying who they were. “Is that a doctor? Nurse? Food service staffer? Person who changes the linens? You had no idea,” she said. They rarely introduced themselves—and it was rarer still for them to explain what they were doing.

  In the midst of his recovery, her father suffered a fall that could have been prevented. A staffer had asked him to stand up even though he was woozy from receiving eight units of blood. Rhodes originally wanted to be by her dad’s side to comfort him, but instead she was forced to be his protector: “I felt like as a family member, I was there to guard him from all the people who were coming in. ‘Who are you? What’s in your hand?’ ”

  Most interactions with the hospital caregivers seemed to lack a basic human warmth. “They treated my dad like he was this old feeble person. . . . I wanted to tell them, ‘He’s a physicist and runs a company that makes satellites!’ ”

  The experience had a profound impact on Rhodes, and not just because she was the daughter of a patient. She was also an executive at Sharp HealthCare, the system that managed the hospital where her father was treated. Advertisements for Sharp raved about the quality of care that patients could expect. In fact, the phone number on the ads—the one patients would call to inquire about treatment—was manned by her own team. After her father’s experience, she wondered: At Sharp, are we really who we say we are?

  She became an aggressive advocate for improving the patient experience—not the medical treatment, which was top-notch, but the service experience. She knew, she said, that fixing it would “define my career for the rest of my life.”

  For a year, she struggled to get attention for her ideas. Eventually, she had a critical meeting with Sharp’s CEO, Michael Murphy. Although Murphy had spent most of his career on the financial side of the business, he had an instinct that Rhodes was right, and he committed himself to transforming Sharp. Murphy challenged his team to learn everything they could about how to deliver world-class service.

  Over a period of about eight months, beginning in the fall of 2000, a team of executives including Murphy and Rhodes traveled together, visiting the stars of service experience: the Ritz-Carlton, Disney, General Electric, and Southwest Airlines. They consulted with experts: the Studer Group and coauthors James Gilmore and Joseph Pine (who wrote the seminal book The Experience Economy).

  One consistent theme from the visits surprised them: You can’t deliver a great patient experience without first delivering a great employee experience. And Sharp’s “employee engagement” scores were weak compared with the likes of Ritz and Southwest.

  Murphy and his executives had started the investigation focused narrowly on patients, but they now expanded their mission. They agreed on a new vision statement for Sharp:

  To transform the health care experience and make Sharp:

  • The best place for employees to work

  • The best place for physicians to practice

  • The best place for patients to receive care

  • Ultimately, the best health care system in the universe

  They called this vision the Sharp Experience. How would they get people to take it seriously, and not dismiss it as another flavor-of-the-month management scheme? They considered a “dog-and-pony” show in which a team of executives, including Murphy, would visit all of Sharp’s health care facilities and share the new vision. But they realized it would take a year, realistically. “And by the time we got to the 30th place, the first place won’t believe us anymore,” Rhodes said.

  Then someone suggested: Why don’t we bring everyone together?

  It seemed ludicrous. Sharp had 12,000 employees. There was no ballroom in San Diego that would fit all of them. And they could hardly put their patients’ emergencies on hold (for the sake of discussing how to care for them better).

  But the Sharp team kept talking and the answer took shape: They’d hold 3 separate sessions over 2 days, allowing them to fit comfortably in the San Diego Convention Center, while maintaining a core staff at all facilities to ensure that patients were not kept waiting. The logistics were daunting: Among other things, they would need to secure practically every available rental bus in San Diego. (In fact, they ended up bringing in buses from Los Angeles and even as far away as Arizona.)

  On October 10, 2001, Sharp held its All-Staff Assembly. The hallways were jammed with Sharp employees who had arrived via bus, trolley, train, and boat. Murphy was pacing backstage nervously. “I’m not somebody who wants to go on a big stage,” he said. But when he took the stage, he spoke candidly about the challenge ahead.

  “This new journey will take courage,” he said. “We are chart
ing a different course because we believe we must in order to be the best.” He urged his team to recommit to the passion and purpose that had led them to work in health care. And above all, he challenged them to act—to take ownership of the mission: “If we can take four steps in a process and reduce it to one, let’s do it! If employees have great ideas for making something better, let’s hear them! If a patient complains about something, let’s make it a priority and fix it!”

  Murphy shared the vision of the Sharp Experience: creating the best place for employees to work, for physicians to practice, and for patients to receive care—and “ultimately the best health care system in the universe.” Some employees laughed at the audacity of the phrase, but his speech struck a chord. “We were used to getting changes through an email on Friday afternoon,” said Kathy Rodean, a nurse who attended the All-Staff Assembly. But now here was Murphy saying, “ ‘This is our vision, and we want you to be part of it, to be able to get where we want to go.’ That was such a different philosophy that it really, really brought people together.”

  After his speech, people were given the opportunity to volunteer for one of 100 “action teams” in areas such as employee satisfaction, patient satisfaction, and reward and recognition. The response was extraordinary: 1,600 people volunteered—agreeing to shoulder extra work in support of the mission.

  “When we finished that first session,” Rhodes said, “people were crying, hugging, high-fiving . . . even the naysayers had tears in their eyes.” One executive who had been skeptical of the event’s value told her afterward, We need to do this every quarter.