Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

IF IT FEELS like change is getting harder to pursue, either from the employee or employer side, you’re not imagining things ― it really is getting harder to move things in a new direction, according to new research from Gartner HR.

“Only one in three mid-to-senior level business leaders said that the last change they led achieved healthy change adoption,” the research found.

Looking into the why, the research pointed to a trust gap. “The nature of change today has made it ungovernable,” said Gartner HR’s director Kayla Velnoskey. “Organizations experiencing ungovernable change are 1.6 times less likely to experience high change trust.”

In a nutshell, change is coming too fast and too furious for anyone to keep up with, let alone believe in and support. Company leadership, the report found, is often working from the wrong playbook. “Typically, leaders use inspiration and the vision of change to get employees to adopt change,” said Velnoskey. “However, Gartner analysis found that the inspirational approach only works when there is high change trust.”

“When you think about it, we’re living in a world characterized by low trust in general,” Velnoskey continued, “and then you layer on top of that this history of broken promises when it comes to organizational change.”

Indeed, “change is a constant” and “move fast and break stuff” have been regular refrains in business for over a decade, and leaders have adopted change, flexibility and agility as values worth pursuing. But it comes with a cost.

“We’ve trained people to brace for disruption, not to believe in transformation,” stated leadership coach Gia Lacqua. “On top of that, reasons for change are poorly communicated. “That erodes trust faster than the change itself,” she said.

The takeaway, said Velnoskey, is that change is contextually different now. “We have evidence that this might have worked in the past, but it’s not working in today’s environment,” she said. “Change is different. The world around us is different. And we need to start doing something different.”

CULTURE

Exit strategy

A cautionary tale about corporate governance, concert rules and why you should never let Chris Martin into your life

Life lessons were everywhere you looked this past week. Such as at the jumbotron during the Coldplay concert at Gillette Stadium in Boston, where you would have learned an important lesson about office relationships: no matter how much you want to snuggle up to the company HR chief, best not to do so on camera.

Poor Andy Byron, (now former) CEO of software company Astronomer, who was caught in a sensual embrace with the company’s head of people, Kristin Cabot. The two go sheet white; both are obviously up to no good. By mid-week, the internet has taken it and meme’d it to the high heavens. By Saturday, Byron had resigned, and Cabot was on administrative leave.

Are there lessons here? Other than the obvious, not really.

Some expressed some concern-slash-sympathy with the pair, whose outing moment was blown up to rather excessive proportions. “If a company CEO is embracing his head of personnel at a concert, could that raise some issues? Sure!” wrote Katie Notopoulos for Business Insider. “That’s for the company and its execs to figure out. But otherwise, who cares? I don’t.”

Others have been less sympathetic to cheating CEOs in the past, though, and so have company execs.

“In the last few years, boardrooms across corporate America have recalculated whether they should be taking these kinds of ethical lapses as a warning sign of bigger problems,” wrote Bloomberg’s Beth Kowitt, unrelated to Coldplay Gate. She pointed out that after the Ashley Madison hack in 2015, one study looked at the CEOs and CFOs named in the hack and found that they were personally twice as likely to have had involvement in a class action security lawsuit. “It’s not necessarily about values,” when boards react swiftly to purge philanderers from the boardroom table. “This is a signal to the board that there could be other issues.”

But then, you’ve also got to ask yourself: had you heard of the company Astronomer before all this? Calling it a blessing in disguise, Ryan McCormick of the PR firm Goldman McCormick said “the real silver lining is that if this company is doing something truly innovative and they're doing something truly groundbreaking, the likelihood of someone finding them has increased substantially.”

For further reflections and a professional point of view on the Coldplay Gate fiasco, check out Terry Talk below!

CAREERS

The power of connections

Star connections can open doors and make individuals appear more capable than their peers. But there’s a catch

“IT’S NOT ABOUT what you know, it’s who you know,” is an oft-repeated maxim, and to a degree it is true. It doesn’t just open doors, though. A recent paper from a group of researchers found that who you know can stick to your reputation for long after you move on ― for both good and ill.

A group of researchers came up with an interesting way to try and quantify this long-term effect of working alongside a star performer, examining the careers of 179 NBA coaches. “We found that coaches who had previously served under legendary leaders, like Phil Jackson for example, were less likely to be fired when their new teams performed worse than industry expectations,” the researchers wrote.

The opposite turned out to be true, as well. “When connected coaches’ teams performed exceptionally well, they were at greater risk of being fired relative to head coaches who lacked any prior star connections.” In other words, the study concluded, “having a star connection helped buffer head coaches from the consequences of underperformance but could hurt them when they performed well.” And this “star effect” lasted for up to nine years, the report found.

The real practical insights though, came when they applied this effect in the real world by running the same study on a group of 500 working professionals. What surprised researches was that the effect held fast. “Study 2 showed experimentally that a star-connected employee, relative to a nonconnected peer, was buffered from the effects of work performance,” because of the “high work performance expectations” of their colleagues.

For the average employee, the data suggests that being well-connected to industry stars must be carefully deployed. Employees can bring these connections up when they are in a phase of relative underperformance to buffer the effects, but they might try not to bring them up when they’re performing well, although the researchers acknowledge the connections “tend to be imprinted in the minds of both employees and their evaluators” regardless.

The authors recommended two adaptations in the workplace. “If you’re evaluating rising leaders: Don’t let reflected prestige cloud your judgment. Your (often unconscious) high expectations for star-connected employees can create blind spots in how you evaluate them,” the researchers wrote in the Harvard Business Review.

And if you’re a rising leader: “Own your accomplishments. Proximity (or distance) from stars can cause biases among evaluators. This makes it even more important to highlight specific outcomes you’ve delivered, challenges you’ve overcome or innovations you’ve led that clearly demonstrate your individual contributions.”

TECHNOLOGY

Can AI be your coworker?

New research is shining a light on how the human-AI relationship is evolving in the workplace

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