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National Leadership Day, which takes place every Feb. 20, offers a chance to reflect on what truly defines leadership not just strategy or decision-making, but the ability to build trust. In an era of rapid change, when teams look to leaders for stability and direction, trust is the invisible currency that fuels organizational success. As an economist, I know theres a lot of research proving this point. Ive conducted some myself, including work on how trust is essential for leaders in cross-cultural business environments. In an expansive study of Chinas fast-paced restaurant industry, my colleagues and I found that leaders who cultivate trust can significantly reduce employee churn and improve organizational performance. While my study focuses on one sector, its lessons extend far beyond that. It offers insights for leaders in any field, from corporate executives to community organizers. Understanding the impact In China, as in the U.S., the restaurant industry is known for high turnover rates and cutthroat competition. But our study found that managers who demonstrate trustworthiness can keep employees from fleeing to rivals, creating a more stable and committed workforce. First, we conducted a field experiment in which we asked managers at around 115 restaurants how much money they were willing to send to employees in an investment game an indicator of trust. We then found that for every 10% increase in managers trust-driven actions, employee turnover fell by 3.7 percentage points. Thats a testament to the power of trust in the workplace. When managers are trustworthy, workers tend to be more loyal, engaged in their job and productive. Employees who perceive their managers as trustworthy report higher job satisfaction and are more willing to exert extra effort, which directly benefits the organization. We also found that when employees trust one another, managers get better performance evaluations. That makes sense, since trust fosters improved cooperation and innovation across the board. Practical steps to foster trust Fortunately for managers and workers theres a lot of research into how to be a more trustworthy leader. Here are a few insights: Empower your team. Let employees take ownership of their responsibilities and make decisions within their roles. This not only boosts their engagement but also aligns their objectives with the broader goals of the organization. Empowerment is a key strategy in building trust. Be fair and transparent. Managers should strive to be consistent in their actions, address concerns promptly and distribute rewards equitably. Those practices can create a psychologically safe and supportive work environment. Promote collaboration. Encourage an atmosphere in which employees can openly share ideas and support one another. Activities that promote team cohesion and open communication can significantly enhance trust within the team. Measure and manage trust. Implementing regular surveys or feedback sessions can help assess and manage trust levels within an organization. Consider integrating trust metrics into performance evaluations to emphasize their importance. Some takeaways for National Leadership Day Whether helming a business, a nonprofit or a local community initiative, leaders should recognize that being trustworthy isnt just a soft skill. Its a measurable force that drives success. By making trust-building a deliberate goal, leaders can create stronger, more resilient teams. So this National Leadership Day is a good time to reflect: How do you build trust in your leadership? And how can you foster a culture of trustworthiness? Managers should commit to leading with trust, acting with integrity and fostering workplaces where people feel valued and empowered. The impact will speak for itself. Yufei Ren is an associate professor of economics at the Labovitz School of Business and Economics at the University of Minnesota Duluth. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
Andrew Brodsky is a management professor at McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also CEO of Ping Group and has received numerous awards, including being chosen by Poets & Quants as one of the Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors of 2023. Whats the big idea? Instant messaging, email, video calls, and other digital tools have largely replaced in-person communication for most workplaces. We have all become virtual communicators, and with this comes a new set of rules for interpersonal success. The PING framework distills best practices for optimal outcomes when relying on technology to communicate. Below, Andrew shares five key insights from his new book, Ping: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication. Listen to the audio versionread by Andrew himselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. P is for perspective taking. When interacting virtually, misinterpretations and misunderstandings are more likely. But this is due to more than the commonly cited fact that we pick up on fewer nonverbal behaviors. In person, it is hard to forget that you are interacting with a human being because they are standing right in front of you. But when looking at a thumbnail-sized video of the person you are interacting with, hearing only their voice through the phone, or seeing nothing but their words in an email, it can be easy to forget that another person is on the other end of your communication. As a result, theres a tendency to be more self-focused virtually than when interacting in person. To see this in action, think of a song you are confident other people would recognize. Then, tap out that song on the nearest hard surface. Once youve done that, estimate how likely it would be for someone else to identify the song if you tapped it out again. This same scenario was played out by Stanford researcher Elizabeth Newton. She found that participants expected 50 percent of listeners would be able to correctly identify their song. However, listeners only recognized the song three percent of the time. This huge discrepancy happens because we hear the music in our heads as we are tapping it out, so it seems obvious to us. All the listeners are just hearing a series of taps. The same applies to virtual communication. We may think our meaning was clear, but because we are so self-focused when interacting from behind a screen, we dont realize the person on the receiving end doesnt have the same context for accurately understanding our meaning. What you think is an obviously friendly and supportive email may come off as condescending to your coworker if they arent privy to all the same information as you. The solution is pausing to consider the recipients perspective before sending or speaking a message virtually. One research-proven strategy for this in text-based communication is reading aloud what you wrote in a different tone than you intended, such as sarcastic or enthusiastic. Does the meaning drastically change? Knowing that the voice someone hears when reading a message isnt necessarily the same one you heard while composing it will help avoid self-focused overconfidence that leads to misinterpretations. 2. I is for initiative. You may have heard about the Fyre Festival debacle in 2017, when a team led by Billy McFarland created hype for a festival that was supposed to have the best of the best in food, music, celebrities, and even buried treasure. What festivalgoers actually found when they arrived were barren parking lots, soggy cheese sandwiches in Styrofoam containers, and a lack of bathroom facilities. Pretty disappointing for what was billed as the biggest FOMO-inducing event of the year. This incredible mismatch in expectations and reality resulted in a $26 million fine and jail time for McFarland. In virtual communication, theres often a disconnect between impressions and reality. Consider how these disconnects can make someone who works incredibly hard seem like a low performer. Imagine you are a manager with two subordinates. From one, you get a single five-paragraph email each Friday about the work they did for the week. From the other, you get a few-sentence email each day, updating you on their tasks. Which one seems to be a harder worker? To show effort and engagement, take the initiative to communicate more frequently. Despite the fact that both employees sent the exact same amount of text, if you are like most managers, you will say the employee who sends a brief few-sentence update each day is a harder worker because that employee seems like they are likely working each day. The one who sends the longer Friday update might just be doing all their work at the end of the week. This is why an important strategy in virtual communication is taking initiative in showing your effort. Whether sending an email to your boss while working remotely or sending them an instant message from the next cubicle over, without taking this kind of initiative you end up in the of out of sight, out of mind pitfall. To show effort and engagement, take the initiative to communicate more frequently. Also, turning on your camera during meetings can help to show that you are physically and mentally present. These small steps make it more likely that those you interact with will perceive your work as a high-end lobster feast as opposed to a Fyre festival soggy cheese sandwich. 3. N is for nonverbal. A Canadian farmer got himself into trouble when he responded to a customers text about an order of flax seed with a thumbs-up emoji. The issue was that the customer thought the thumbs up meant the contract was accepted. The farmer disagreed, saying he hadnt planned on accepting it just yet. The court sided with the customer, stating that the thumbs up constituted a legally binding agreement. The farmer had to pay almost $62,000. Undergraduates and MBA students often ask me, Should I use emojis in my virtual communication? The answer isnt simple because research shows emojis can help or hurt depending on the situation. Dont focus so much on what cues are best or worst. Rather, pay attention to how the person you are interacting with communicates and become a conversational chameleon. If they fill their texts with emojis and exclamation points, then feel free to do the same. If they use business jargon, follow their lead. If they take a more formal approach, it can behoove you to do the same. A study led by Kate Muir found that negotiators who mimicked their partners behavior style by using similar nonverbal behaviors improved their individual outcomes by 39 percent and joint outcomes by over 30 percent. These mimicry effects are driven by two factors. First, we generally all think that our own communication style is the best, so when someone else communicates like us, we think they are doing it effectively. Second, we trust people who are similar to us, so when someone communicates in a way that feels familiar, we tend to trust them more. Even in the barest of virtual communication modes, nonverbal behavior plays a central role in how our messages are perceived. 4. G is for goals. Should you schedule a meeting or send an email? Is phone or video better for reconnecting with old contacts? Whats the best mode to use when meeting someone for thefirst time? Too often, people thoughtlessly approach these and similar questions by defaulting to whichever mode is right in front of them without considering the consequences. A while back, I was giving a talk to a group of retail executives, and someone asked a great question: whats the best mode choice when you need to display emotions you might not really be feeling? Such as needing to seem excited during a customer interaction, even when you may be stressed or frustrated for unrelated reasons. Telephone seems much higher effort and thus more authentic than email, yet it allows you to avoid leaking nonverbal behavior indicating your true emotions. I ran a series of studies on this topic, using study contexts including negotiators, coworkers, and teachers and parents from international schools in Vietnam. Imagine you are a teacher in a school where parents pay a lot of money for their child to attend. Now, you have to tell one of these parents why their perfect angel is failing your course and being suspended due to serious misbehavior. Despite your frustrations with the studentand the parents for not helping improve mattersyou need to put on your best smile to ensure the interaction goes smoothly. There were three key findings in these studies. First, if you are being authentic, then the richest mode of interactionface-to-face or videois best as it comes off as the highest effort and lets your authenticity shine through. If you need to fake it, I found that many people choose email, but that is the worst choice because email seems so low effort that it comes off as most inauthentic. For those who aimed to appear authentic while masking underlying emotions, audio interactions were the sweet spot. Telephone seems much higher effort and thus more authentic than email, yet it allows you to avoid leaking nonverbal behavior indicating your true emotions. This choice was consequential as in my studies. It determined everything from parent satisfaction with their teacher, how much coworkers were willing to engage with each other going forward, and to what degree negotiators punished one another with severe counteroffers. By defining your interaction goals, you will be able to strategically select the right mode and message to improve outcomes and avoid situations that risk you making bad impressions. 5. AI will never replace the human touch. Imagine receiving a sympathy email from a colleague after the death of a loved one. The email is supportive, but you immediately recognize the message was AI-generated because your colleague doesnt normally use formal words like elevate and profound. After making this observation, you probably think your colleague doesnt really care about you because they did not write the message themselves. When it comes to the most important interactions, theres no replacement for the human touch. Researchers have found that people instinctively think of everything from songs to recipes to paintings as more authentic when we believe they were created by a human, as opposed to identical ones that were AI-generated. When something is hand-crafted, it seems more effortful and special. In the vast majority of interactions, it will be impossible for others to tell that you used AI to create something on your behalf, but all it takes is one slip up for your interaction partner to suspect you did not write the message personally. Then, they will question every single virtual interaction youve had with them and wonder whether you were simply outsourcing your communication and not putting effort into the relationship. They will ask themselves why they interact with you personally in the first place if all they are doing is speaking with an AI. There are times when AI increases productivity, such as using AI as an assistant for ancillary aspects of communicationsuch as generating ideas, editing, and summarizing conversations. This can free up valuable time and mental energy for more complex, nuanced interactions. But, as AI replacing human communication becomes more common, adding that human touch to core parts of communication is likely to become an ever-more-valuable signal of how much you value a relationship and how vital you are as a person to that interaction. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
It might sound a little silly that theres an entire subgenre of influencers who offer investment advice around Pokémon trading cards. Probably because it is a little silly. The idea of some YouTube Jim Cramer breathlessly warning viewers that Surging Sparks is setting a fire under collectors and investors is the stuff Saturday Night Live sketches are made of. Yet, theres nothing silly about the amount of money changing hands in the Pokémon card space these days. Especially right now. If it werent clear from all the viral videos of brawls at various Costcos, the soaring popularity of Pokémon cards has lately reached stratospheric new heights. (Costco ultimately had to institute a one unit per membership per day policy on its Pokémon offerings.) Overall value of the cards has spiked by 20% in the past six monthsaccording to Elizabeth Gruene, who oversees Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA)’s pop culture and trading-card-games divisionwith some individual cards skyrocketing by as much as 150%. And a lot of that increase has happened in just the past few months. Whats behind the surge? A confluence of events Gruene describes as a perfect storm, building on several years of intense interest in Pokémon. The Pokémon phenomenon originally began in 1996 when Japanese boutique video-game company Game Freak launched the first-ever game in the series. Players set out to capture all 151 species of pocket monsters dispersed throughout a magical realm, hence the catchphrase, Gotta catch em all. The game was an instant, monster-size hit that spawned a multibillion-dollar empire of movies, TV shows, theme parks, and, of course, trading cards. When it reached the U.S. in 1999, kids across America quickly adopted the catch-em-all ethos, tearing through packs in search of rare cards to impress their friends with oramong the more enterprising youngstersto appreciate in value. Those kids have since grown into working adults, many of whom now have enough disposable income to buy the rare cards that once eluded themsay, a first-edition Shining Charazard now worth $4,000or buy packs for their own kids from the Pokémon vending machines now at grocery stores around the U.S. (The standard price for unopened packs is generally $4.49, but good luck getting your hands on them at the moment.) Millennial nostalgia, combined with high-profile superfans like Logan Paul, led to a veritable pokéssance, so to speak, starting in the early part of the pandemic. Pokémon trading cards have since become so popular as a game, as a series of collectibles, and as an investment opportunity, that PSA, the industry leader in assessing the condition and legitimacy of trading cards, now grades more Pokémon cards than baseball or any other sport. Even with Pokémon interest already fairly high, though, Gruene noticed a massive uptick of late. Our submission numbers are just insane right now, she says. We have quite a big backlog that we’re working through. [Photo: John Keeble/Getty Images] One of the main drivers of the surge, according to Gruene, is a newly strong release slate. While 2024 was mostly soft in terms of excitement around new Pokémon offerings, Novembers Surging Sparks series introduced a lot of highly sought-after cards. That release was followed in January by a new one, Prismatic Evolutions, featuring some extremely popular characters from Pokémon lore, including Eevee and the Eeveelutions. (Some of the chase cards from Prismatic Evolutionsan Umbreon ex Special Illustration Rare card, for instanceare so sought after that theyre already reportedly worth more than $1,500.) One reason the excitement around certain new releases reverberates beyond players and over to the purely investment-minded crowd is because more new Pokémon cards have instant high value than their sports-cards brethren. While the most valuable baseball cards are overwhelmingly vintage cards, Pokémon produces a greater volume of high-value new cards. A particular rarity from Novembers Surging Sparks release, for instancePikachu ex Special Illustration Rarerecently sold for $1,000 on eBay. With the new sports releases, it has to be a one-of-one or some really low population-count card to have a ton of value, but we don’t really see that as much in Pokémon, says Gruene. There might be a new card that comes in 10,000 or 20,000 packs that could each still sell for $1,000-plus. The total market cap for these cards is just a lot bigger than what we see in sports. The value of any trading card is determined by the secondary market, and whatever people are willing to pay for it. In the case of Pokémon, people are willing to pay five, six, and in some cases, seven figures, though since the vast majority of packs contain only cards worth as much as the paper theyre printed on makes card-flipping more like gambling than an investment. But booms in value like the one were now experiencing, tend to follow excitement around the cardsa hype cycle in which resellers can charge more once demand outpaces supply. While some coveted new releases have helped fuel the current enthusiasm around Pokémon cards, another factor driving it is the Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. The game, which came out October 30, recreates the experience of opening packs of Pokémon cards but also adds an immersive element, transporting players into the pocket monsters world. By mid-December, the mobie app had already been downloaded more than 60 million times. Popular streamers on Twitch and on YouTube had turned the act of opening packs into a vicarious thrill; TCG Pocket gave those onlookers, and newcomers, a way to experience it themselves. It seems quite likely that the games explosive popularity enticed droves of new fans to take the leap from opening virtual packs of cards to seeking out the real thing. That was a big cultural moment, Gruene says. And we did see a big bump in trading-card submissions around that time frame last year too. A final potential factor in the recent spike in Pokémon card value, according to Gruene, is the new partnership between PSA and GameStop. Sending cards off to PSA for grading can be a complicated process for newcomers, but ever since the partnership began last October, card owners can now just drop off their wares at a GameStop and let the workers do the rest. That increased accessibility for a necessary step in selling high-value cards, arriving alongside the new mobile game and some sensational new card series, may have added to the recent value surge. It certainly couldnt have hurt, at least. Of course, the danger around this boom is that it could end up being a Beanie Babies-like bubble (and fodder for an Apple TV+ original movie a decade or two after it bursts). Whether the current hype lasts much longer is a mystery for Detective Pikachu, but considering that next year is the 30th anniversary of Pokémon, many more people just may catch it.
Category:
E-Commerce
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