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By: Abbie Buck

These four strategies can boost diversity in your organization and in your executive ranks, this Silicon Valley CHRO writes.

Less than half of all startups in the United States have at least one woman in the C-suite or on the board of directors, according to Silicon Valley Bank’s 2020 gender gap report. That’s not just disappointing progress, it’s also bad business, as research has shown that companies with more female executives are more likely to outperform less diverse companies, McKinsey reports.

The causes of this lack of diversity are varied and complicated, and the pandemic ismaking it worse by pushing many women out of the workforce due to childcare demands. It’s a complicated problem, but the path toward remedying the situation doesn’t have to be.

At Collective Health, our C-suite is 43% female and our workforce is 53% female. Because we are a health tech company working to provide frictionless healthcare benefits, it’s imperative that our workforce reflects the population we serve and that our leadership reflects both. Our work is at its best only through hiring, retaining and promoting a diverse set of perspectives so that we may better serve our customers.

Sadly, this is not the case at many companies. Even those that have diverse workforces too often have a lack of diversity in senior leadership. Progress in the latter area has been especially slow. More than a third of the companies in a McKinsey recent survey have no women at all on their executive teams.

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by Kumar Mehta

Setting goals is easy; everybody has the same lofty goals and everybody dreams of reaching the top. But only the rarest of people achieve them. If you want to make your crazy dreams come true, your best bet is to use the approach that the most exceptional people have taken. The following steps show you how the best in the world think about goal setting and developing the plan to achieve them.

1.      Set a clear goal: You have to start with a clear vision of what you want, even if you don’t have the capabilities to realize it. Usain Bolt wanted to become the fastest human on earth even before he was a 100-meter runner. He did not, as yet, have all the tools to reach his goal, but he knew precisely what he wanted to achieve.

If you can establish a goal that you want to pursue unwaveringly, you will have attained a level of clarity and purpose that most people will never experience. When you sincerely believe that you can do something exceptional, then everyone around you begins to share your belief, and the universe conspires in helping you achieve it. And soon, the improbable becomes probable, and the unachievable is within reach. (more…)

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by Liz Wiseman

Creating the right environment and implementing five key coaching habits are crucial

“The Dream Team.” It was the name given to the 1992 US men’s Olympic basketball team composed of some of the greats of the game, including Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, and John Stockton. We’ve seen dream teams in other sports, of course—Brazil’s 1970 football team that won the World Cup; the 1980 USSR Olympic ice hockey “red machine” team; and the US team that won the 2019 Women’s World Cup. We’ve seen dense concentrations of star talent working under the influence of strong leadership in other fields throughout history, too, such as the artists of the Italian Renaissance or the five-time Nobel laureates of the Curie family.

We also find dream teams inside our modern workplaces. The best leaders don’t just stumble upon such teams; they know how to build a dream team, even under challenging circumstances. And they do this not by focusing on one or two impact players but by carefully curating team members with the right mindset; developing them as individuals and as a team; and nurturing a robust, healthy culture. (more…)

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by Maria Guadalupe, INSEAD Professor of Economics, Zoe Kinias, INSEAD Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, and Florian Schloderer, INSEAD Lecturer

How employees’ personal values fit within their organisation.

All kinds of workers enter their organisations as humans first, with their own outlooks and values. These values are the fundamental beliefs that define what they feel is good, motivating their actions. In parallel, the role of organisational values, for good and bad, looms ever larger as firms promote their corporate beliefs. What happens when fighting against climate change, for example, is important to a person’s sense of self? Working for an organisation that lacks ecological commitment would clearly be problematic for that individual.

These tensions between individual and organisational values have been clearly identified in management research. For example, close alignment between individuals’ values and those of their organisations leads to a number of positive organisational outcomes including a reduction in staff turnover. The literature also indicates that reflecting on personal values in an organisational context affirms feelings of self-integrity. Thus, when individuals experience identity threat due to negative stereotypes about the demographic group to which they belong, values reflection can reduce self-doubt and enable them to perform to the best of their ability.

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