What will it take to move beyond merely surviving to excelling in our careers? How can we create thriving professional environments centered around “purpose, potential and perspective” that both attract and retain outstanding people? How much more creativity, value, fulfillment, and joy could we realize?
These and other questions are considered in the lead article, Deloitte Insights’ Leading Forward: Leading the Shift From Survive To Thrive. The authors provide actionable insights from their research on organizations redefining what effective, forward-thinking leadership can and will need to look like. As we saw in last week’s newsletter, this is especially relevant now, with approximately 1 in 4 people actively considering career switches, with a significant subset of those folks citing poor work culture as a primary change driver.
“Purpose, potential and perspective” are paramount to thriving cultures and the overall success of people and their companies. If that is the goal then the question becomes what needs to be strategically re-imagined and transformed in the areas of recruiting, hiring, acculturating, promoting and retaining a workforce that strives to excel? The balance of the reading and listening is centered on selected research and thought pieces on how to address these areas to bring about meaningful, scalable and sustainable change. There is quite an eclectic range of thoughts and nuanced points of view to consider.
Ultimately, “leaders should find ways to create a shared sense of purpose that mobilizes people to pull strongly in the same direction as they face the organization’s current and future challenges. They should trust people to work in ways that allow them to fulfill their potential, offering workers a degree of choice over the work they do to align their passions with organizational needs. And they should embrace the perspective that reimagining work is key to the ability to achieve new and better outcomes in a world that is itself being constantly reimagined.” Deloitte Insights’ Leading Forward: Leading the Shift From Survive To Thrive.
As always, happy reading and listening!
Articles
Deloitte Insights’ Leading forward: Leading the shift from survive to thrive. “Three powerful concepts–purpose, potential, and perspective–can point the way toward the future of human capital, empowering leaders to re-architect work in ways that lead to new outcomes and new value.”
Reengineering the Recruitment Process. “The Covid-19 pandemic has upended many traditional business practices. When it comes to recruiting, the crisis has not so much disrupted as accelerated shifts in the talent landscape that were already under way, leaving many companies poorly served by their current hiring practices…Competition for top talent remains keen—and in uncertain times, bringing on the right people is more important than ever.”
Social media-predicted personality traits and values can help match people to their ideal jobs. “…The information that people broadcast online through social media provides insights into who they are, which we show can be used to match people and occupations. Findings have implications for career guidance for new graduates, disengaged employees, career changers, and the unemployed.”
How to ace your next online job interview. “COVID-19 has had a huge impact on the way we work — and that includes how we interview for that work. While remote job interviews are nothing new, they’re now the norm as companies grapple with reopening. As we prepare for them, there are a few important things that we should bear in mind.”
Confidence Often Wins Over Competence in Job Interviews, New Stanford Study Shows. “The findings shed light on how you can avoid hiring the loud and mediocre over the quiet and talented.”
How to Reduce Personal Bias When Hiring. “Diversity in our workplace makes us smarter, more innovative and promotes better critical thinking. It’s not only the organization that benefits, we personally have a lot to gain by working with people from all different backgrounds. By recognizing how we benefit from reducing our own bias — rather than focusing on the ROI for the company — we’re likely to be more motivated to take action.”
Salary Negotiations: A Catch-22 for Women. “The higher a woman rises through a company’s ranks, the more backlash she faces if she negotiates her salary assertively—a phenomenon that contributes to the wide gender gap in the C-suite, new research suggests.”
Experience Doesn’t Predict a New Hire’s Success. “…Even when people had completed tasks, held roles, or worked in functions or industries relevant to their current ones, it did not translate into better performance. The conclusion: Experience doesn’t predict a new hire’s success.”
Research: Adding Women to the C-Suite Changes How Companies Think. “…Our research aims simply to shed light on exactly how the integration of female leaders at the highest levels of an organization impacts its approach to innovation, and ultimately suggests that including more women in executive decision-making may lead firms to consider a wider variety of value creation strategies.”
How Companies Are Using Creative Incentives to Attract and Keep New Talent Now. “U.S. job openings are at the highest they’ve been in two years. But companies are still short-staffed.”
8 Things Leaders Do That Make Employees Quit. “…Focusing on your own behaviors, what you can control, will do wonders to improve the performance and cohesiveness of your team. The better you manage, the more productive, innovative, satisfied, and most importantly, loyal your team will be.”
21 HR Jobs of the Future. “Companies that can anticipate their organization’s future HR roles are not only in a position to outperform competitors, they are also squarely positioning HR as a strategic business driver. As new and existing roles evolve, the most successful organizations will have a clear understanding of what needs to change to meet future business priorities (both anticipated and unanticipated).”
Book
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. “Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets? A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived.”
Podcasts
TED: The Way We Work. How We Can Use the Hiring Process To Bring Out the Best In People. “Traditional job interviews are stressful interrogations that can often exclude marginalized populations. Here’s how psychologist and entrepreneur Gil Winch says we can rethink hiring, training and onboarding to allow people to show their true potential.”
Freakonomics Radio’s No Stupid Questions: “How Can You Identify Hidden Talent? With Eric Schmidt.”
HBR IdeaCast: Taking on a Senior Leadership Role Remotely. “Muriel Wilkins…says that starting a leadership role at a new company or via internal promotion is demanding. Doing so remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic is even more challenging. She says that new senior leaders must focus on two things: connectivity and credibility. And she explains how to build those attributes when much of the job is performed virtually.” [While this podcast focuses on senior leaders, the concepts of connectivity and credibility apply to anyone taking on a new/different role. There is much here for folks at all levels.]
Blog Posts
The CEO’s Guide to Hiring Executives—According to Someone Who Has Hired Hundreds. “In this blog post, Steve [Melia, Talent Partner at OpenView] shares how to widen your talent pool, identify sneaky red flags founders commonly overlook, and foster a more diverse C-suite.”
I Have Read Thousands of Résumés, and I Have Some Advice. “The history of this strange document can tell job seekers what works and what doesn’t.”
Welcome to the YOLO Economy. “Burned out and flush with savings, some workers are quitting stable jobs in search of postpandemic adventure.”
Arts, Music & Culture Corner
“‘Damn, this is a Caravaggio!’: the inside story of an old master found in Spain. Art dealer Giancarlo Ciaroni attempted to buy painting listed at €1,500 for €500,000 – but discovered bewildered owners already had two offers of €3m.”
“Big Music Needs to Be Broken Up to Save the Industry. A year without live music has been a disaster. So has corporate power in streaming, recording, and ticketing. Antitrust may be the only solution.”
“The restaurant putting workers in charge – and inequality on the chopping block. A rotating menu of Filipino, Moroccan, and Mexican cuisine underpins an ambition to uplift the food industry labor structure [at Oakland’s Understory].”
Reflection
“All you have to do, if you want everything in life from everybody else, is first pay attention; listen to them; show them respect; give them meaning, satisfaction, and fulfillment. Convey to them that they matter to you. And show you love them. But you have to go first. And what are you going to get back? Mirrored reciprocation.”
– Peter Kaufman
