Author Archives: Larry Janis

Leadership

 

 

Early in the pandemic, Josh Bersin called it the Big Reset: “The Coronavirus is accelerating one of the biggest business transformations in decades.”

As the business landscape evolves and employees reassess their priorities, leadership is changing as well. To reset thinking on what it means to be a leader today, we asked Josh Bersin and other thought and business leaders for their perspective.

 

  • Great Leadership is about getting the best out of your team, by allowing team members to play roles where their superpowers can enhance the work of others!

-Michael McDaniel, President, Modern Workplace, DXC Technology

 

  • Competence – you can’t fake it, know the details of what is going on around you.  If you don’t know something, ask the questions and do the research to learn it.
  • Calmness – when the chips are down, and they will be at some point, leaders need to maintain calmness, showing empathy for people who are trying to do the right thing, clinically remove the people who aren’t, and set an example for a culture of respect, integrity all while not compromising on the vision and objectives of the business.
  • Creating the conditions for success – if your organization is succeeding in spite of itself (which with enough brute force can happen), then that is a leadership issue.  Focus on eliminating roadblocks, complexity and any other impediments for your organization to succeed.

-Mark Trepanier

 

  • I hear collaboration used more than teamwork now a days. Professionals need to work not only with their team but others in the organization too.  Empathy is a very strong theme with the employees having a larger pull and due to the pandemic. It’s a sign of the times and one I hope remains important for years to come.  Great leadership is effective when it is trusted and loyal. I think communicating a vision, establishing attainable and challenging goals, then rewarding them is a big part of being a leader. Great leadership is effective for the people and in turn the business.

-Jenny Illum, Director, Executive Recruiting & Diversity Recruitment. Bath & Body            Works

 

If you’re inspired by these perspectives on leadership today, stay tuned…there’s more to come!  And if you are interested in crafting your own contribution, please email me at janis@issg.net

 

High performers need these 5 things, according to science

 

 

BY GWEN MORAN

 

Managers can help keep their best talent engaged and motivated with a few tips from neuroscience.

 

 

 

Regardless of the state of the labor market, organizations generally want to keep their high-performing employees. That means keeping them supported and engaged, so they’re motivated not only to stay, but to keep making their outsized contributions. Experts believe that we can learn a few things about managing rock-star employees from the world of neuroscience.

High performers may have stronger neural connections related to their jobs because their engagement and mastery of tasks strengthen them, says Jason Jones, founder and CEO of LeaderPath (which uses evidence-based methods to improve workplace performance), and author of Activator: Using Brain Science to Boost Motivation, Deepen Engagement, and Supercharge Performance. They may have greater process expertise, knowledge, problem-solving skills, or the ability to innovate, which can enhance motivation and performance, but may also lead to a greater risk of boredom in the wrong environments. 

While it’s not realistic to expect managers—or even high performers, themselves—to become brain scientists, cribbing a few tips from this sector can help keep those lights on. Here are a few things that neuroscience tells us high performers need.

SAFETY

Threats come in different forms, and none of them are good for engagement or motivation, says HR expert Christy Pruitt-Haynes, a consultant at NeuroLeadership Institute, a global neuroscience-backed consultancy that works with Fortune 100 companies. When a threat is perceived, we shift cognitive resources to minimizing that threat, and tend to be less collaborative. “So, what managers really need to understand is how each of their team members are aligned to process threat and reward, so we can move them toward that reward state and away from that threat state,” she says.

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A data-driven approach to career development and employee retention

 

 

by Michelle Howard

 

Challenges around the skills crisis, or “war for talent”, have been made more prominent in today’s evolving workforce. Instead of narrowing the impossible talent gap, organisations are moving their focus towards maximising and retaining the skills employees already possess.

When it comes to the IT industry, there is an added complexity given the rapid pace at which technology is progressing. Tech organisations, large or small, need people who are willing to learn, transfer skills, and adapt to these changing requirements.

According to the Equinix 2022 Global Tech Trends Survey, 63 per cent of IT decision-makers view a shortage of personnel with IT skills as one of the main threats to their business. Organisations who try to rehire former employees or seek new talent may need more time to re-skill and upskill these employees.

Leveraging the power of graph technology

Beyond training and redeploying people, it is becoming imperative to help employees reach their personal career goals. Employees are quite often confused by the complex ecosystem of platforms, systems and processes that have been deployed within their organisations. Whilst employees simply want to know what in-demand skills they should have for career development opportunities, managers may not always have the necessary data to provide this advice.

Organisations maintain large amounts of data about their employees and in most cases that data resides in siloed systems that are difficult to connect. Graph databases and graph data science allows organisations to connect siloed data and determine the complex relationships within this data which can then be applied to various use cases for workforce planning analytics and career development recommendations for employees. (more…)

Good leaders are good listeners. Here’s how to be one of them.

 

 

 

BY ART MARKMAN

 

These three skills are critical to become an effective leader.

 

Early in your career, you know the details of everything you’re working on. You have to, because you are generally responsible for those details. That is the core of being a frontline worker. You are carrying out key tasks that are central to the work of your organization. You may not have the full perspective on why the work is being done the way it is, but you do know a lot of details about what is happening.

As you advance in your career, you get an increasingly high-level view of what is happening within the organization. You are given more information about the strategy driving your firm and may even have more authority to make key decisions. You also get to see how the various tasks being done across the firm come together to push that strategy forward.

The cost of this elevated perch is that you are further from the details of how things are being accomplished. You are not having the same kind of day-to-day interactions with the frontline work that you did earlier in your career. As a result, you may not be aware of important elements that might be crucial for strategic decision-making.

In order to have the detail you need to be effective in your leadership role, you need to have regular conversations with those people who are responsible for the details you don’t know, and you need to become a really good questioner and listener.

To do that, there are three skills you have to develop:

LET OTHER PEOPLE TALK

Promotions come with additional responsibility, but they also come along with more prestige and status as well. It is tempting to use these roles as an excuse to dominate the meetings you’re in by sharing your opinions and beliefs early and often.

There is certainly some need to share your thoughts on strategy with others, but great leaders let other people talk—a lot.

You need to hear the perspectives of other people in order to get a broader view of what is going on in your organization than just what you are able to see directly. Often, the people with the vantage that differs most from your own are people whose jobs are much lower level than your own. As much as you might be tempted to spend the time sharing your wisdom, you will benefit from ensuring that you hear from a wide range of people.

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5 barriers to break in order to build trust between coworkers

 

 

BY JUSTIN PATTON

 

High-trust organizations refuse to leave people second-guessing.

 

 

 

Most executive teams engage in annual strategic planning sessions focused on improving their business the following year, but trust is rarely on the agenda. It’s a shame, because in many cases, the key to success lies not in creating an entirely new strategy, but in dismantling barriers to trust within a given organization.

As an executive leadership coach, I’ve spent over a decade coaching leaders on how to build trust in themselves, with others, and throughout their organization.

So what are the barriers to trust, and how can we dismantle them? Here are five of the most common trust issues I see in companies and what high-trust organizations do differently.

 

BARRIER #1: THE EXECUTIVE TEAM LACKS TRANSPARENCY

When leaders don’t explain the decisions they make, they leave room for employees to fill in the gaps themselves. Unfortunately, it is human nature to fill those gaps with fear. This can lead to a lack of trust.

A lack of transparency recently cost a client of mine some of its top talent. The executive team announced changes to the bonus structure for their general managers without explaining the reason and timeline. Managers left the call wondering what drove the decision, whether it was permanent, and how it would affect their overall pay. A week later, I was speaking to one of their biggest competitors when an executive told me three of that organization’s top restaurant managers applied with them just that week.

High-trust organizations understand that trust is valuable and are therefore restlessly committed to communicating the “why” behind decisions. High-trust organizations know that’s how they create clarity and gain buy-in. High-trust organizations refuse to leave people second-guessing.

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