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by Adam Bryant

To help build authenticity, be clear on the specific values that have guided your career and that you expect others to embrace.

Early on in our careers, we are schooled in the importance of the elevator pitch, so that we can deliver a concise answer if somebody important we meet in passing asks, “What are you working on?” or “What do you do here?” The succinct sales pitch is also an essential skill for entrepreneurs taking turns in front of an audience of investors: they have to be able to capture their killer idea in a dozen or so words.

But in our consulting work with senior leaders, we find there is a specific type of elevator pitch that executives often overlook. It’s the answer to the questions “So what kind of leader are you?” and “What should we know about your leadership style?” Having a thoughtful reply at the ready could be a factor in landing a promotion. But more crucially, providing clarity about your leadership style will help you to build trust with your team. Think of it as your personal leadership brand—what you stand for, including the values that guide your behaviors as a leader, and what you expect from others.

It’s not that people don’t have anything to say in response to these questions. Some will volunteer that they believe in “servant leadership,” or that they are results-driven or believe in excellence and integrity.

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By Stacy Collett

From offering meaningful work to embracing hybrid environments, CIOs whose organizations have established virtuous IT recruiting cycles share tips on how to consistently attract IT talent.

As the war for IT talent rages on, some companies seem to be staying out of the trenches, even when it comes to the most sought-after skills.

CPA firm Plante Moran fills open IT positions in 48 days on average — from job post to onboard date — even for the hardest-to-fill roles in application development, data analytics, cybersecurity, and cloud engineering. That includes several rounds of interviews and testing to ensure a good fit. By comparison, most employers in 2020 took an average of 69 days to fill a tech role, according to a survey by recruiting cloud platform iCIMS.

Owens Corning often hires outstanding IT talent, even without an open position. “If an exceptional technologist approaches HR, or an IT staffer offers a great referral, we just go ahead and hire them, and often when we don’t have a role that we’re shopping,” says CIO Steve Zerby. “We build roles around people; we don’t put people in roles.”

These and other nontechnology companies have created a virtuous recruiting cycle in which IT talent is likely to seek out its opportunities, rather than the organization constantly having to do the selling to top candidates.

Attracting great talent requires more than a great compensation package, although IDG’s IT Salary Survey 2021 shows that tech workers most often seek new jobs for higher compensation (61%). But they’re also seeking career advancement (47%), interesting work (38%), and personal fulfillment.

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by Henning Piezunka, INSEAD Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise

Collaboration with a partner is not strictly a two-way affair; instead, prospective partners take the entire competitive landscape into account when forming ties.

In the movie Jerry Maguire, a sports agent played by Tom Cruise is fired from his top agency after openly criticising its impersonal approach. He is forced to go it alone, but all his clients desert him, preferring to continue to be represented by a large, established organisation. That is, all except American footballer Rod Tidwell (played by Cuba Gooding Jr), who feels his career could use more personalised attention.

While movie-goers know that, indeed, things end well for Tidwell, an important question remains: When striking a partnership, is it better to be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big pond? In a paper published in the Academy of Management Journal, my co-authors* and I looked at the particular case of developers and publishers of PlayStation2 (PS2) video games, at a time when self-publishing of titles was not yet an option and developer-publisher ties were necessary to commercialise a game. We found that the level of experience of developers and the relative uncertainty they faced in terms of getting personalised attention from a publisher were driving much of their decision to seek a certain “pond” size.

Two conflicting goals requiring a trade-off

Akin to the book industry with its authors and publishing houses, the video game industry involves developers that propose game concepts and initial development, and publishers that provide late-stage development and access to markets. Out of the 163 PS2 games which have sold more than 1 million units, only 30 were published directly by Sony, the manufacturer of the console.

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By: Julie Cook Ramirez

|Even as concerns over the Delta COVID variant continue to rise, many organizations are confident the worst of the pandemic is behind us and are rapidly planning for the long-awaited “return to work.” While some CEOs are expecting that to mean a return to the traditional office setting, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that many companies are going to be adapting to a “more flexible, forgiving work environment,” according to a new report by the Josh Bersin Academy.

“CEOs and their very top executive teams are accustomed to having face-to-face interactions with people, so their expectation is that the recovery from the pandemic will be a big reentry into the offices,” says Josh Bersin, founder and dean of the Josh Bersin Academy and a keynoter at the upcoming HR Technology Conference who will explore the future of hybrid work in a free webinar on July 21. “Employees are saying, ‘Wait a minute, I was very productive during the last year-and-a-half and I’d like to keep doing what I’m doing,’ so there’s a bit of a tug of war going on.”

Once considered code for “not working,” Bersin says, the pandemic broke the stigma of working from home and taught employers that it can work. As the job market grows more competitive, employers are having to reevaluate their attitude toward remote work. Already, points out Bersin, the second-most-common “location” for job postings on LinkedIn is “remote.”

Yet, not all organizations are sold on the idea of an entirely remote workforce. Consequently, many are looking to a hybrid work environment where employees work in the office on certain days and remotely on others. In the Hybrid Work Playbook, researchers write that there’s no clear model for this new world of hybrid work. However, simply “repurposing legacy policies on remote work” is unlikely to be sufficient.

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By Adi Gaskell

A couple of years ago I wrote about the value of having a workforce with a high degree of class diversity. The article focused on what are referred to as “social class transitioners,” who are people that have managed to progress between socioeconomic classes during their life, and it emerged that those who were able to do that brought particular value to the workplace.

“People who transition between classes can learn to relate to people in a more skilled way, and they are incredibly helpful in groups, as they can understand people from all walks of life,” argue researchers from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. “However, it can also be an exhausting and even isolating experience for that person.”

Emerging early
This is far from easy to achieve, however, not least as Yale research shows that class bias can emerge as soon as we open our mouths. The study examined job interview scenarios and found that someone’s class and socioeconomic status can be discerned within the first few seconds of them opening their mouth. What’s more, the study shows that these snap judgments then impact the candidates that hiring managers prefer, with those from higher social classes picked more frequently than their working-class peers.

“Our study shows that even during the briefest interactions, a person’s speech patterns shape the way people perceive them, including assessing their competence and fitness for a job,” the researchers explain. “While most hiring managers would deny that a job candidate’s social class matters, in reality, the socioeconomic position of an applicant or their parents is being assessed within the first seconds they speak — a circumstance that limits economic mobility and perpetuates inequality.”

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