Tag Archives: coaching

7 steps to becoming a thought leader

Posted on

By John Edwards

You’re the sort of person who likes to solve problems. Co-workers and colleagues come to you for advice, ideas, insights and solutions. You also enjoy being a mentor, someone who doesn’t mind investing his or her time in order to help people achieve their goals.

Congratulations. Whether you realize it or not, you’re a thought leader, an authority whose IT expertise is frequently sought and, sometimes, rewarded. Now that you’re aware of your distinct status, perhaps it’s time you put your talents to work in a way that will promote your organization — and yourself.

Positioning oneself as a thought leader opens the door to multiple benefits, says Patrick Turner, CTO of Small Footprint, a custom software development company. “While it can certainly help you find that next step up the career ladder, it can also help you build a great team in the recruiting process,” explains Turner, who has positioned himself as his firm’s top thought leader. “People today look to companies where they can learn and grow professionally, and seeing thought leadership in a company can be a big draw for good people.” Continue reading →

How Your Network Can Help and Hurt You

Posted on

by Martin Gargiulo

Your performance is dependent on the type of network you have.

Working for investment banks is not for the faint of heart. Workweeks of 100+ hours involving all-night sessions and meals at desks in order to complete heavy loads of difficult work have long been the lot of this industry’s professionals.

To thrive and not merely survive, however, junior investment bankers have to earn the trust and respect of colleagues and clients if they are to be given the chance to trade important stocks or to have their own customers.

A strong support network is vital in helping junior employees excel at their work and curb the risks of making mistakes as they learn on the job in a fast-moving business environment. The importance of this network is apparent in the career advice of a former head of proprietary trading at Bank of America Merrill Lynch: “Ask every single other person on the planet for help before you go back to your manager.”

In my paper “Homophily and Individual Performance”, published in Organization Science, co-authored with Charles Galunic of INSEAD and Gokhan Ertug and Tengjian Zou of SMU, we find that building a support network of people like you can enhance your performance in such an environment.

Continue reading →

Why business needs a ‘moral revolution’

Posted on

By Leigh Gallagher

Acumen founder Jacqueline Novogratz issued a powerful challenge to the roomful of CEOs at Fortune’s CEO Initiative conference on Tuesday: Business had the technology revolution; now it needs a “moral revolution.”

Describing her journey of leaving a successful career on Wall Street three decades ago to start a microfinance institution in Rwanda—which turned into more than $100 million in investment across 108 companies around the globe that has used entrepreneurism to bring services to more than 270 million people in the developing world—Novogratz shared lessons and advice for CEOs seeking to help solve the world’s most pressing issues.

Among Novogratz’s lessons: Empathy alone isn’t enough, she said, because empathy allows power dynamics to remain intact. “We don’t really have to change if we feel another person’s pain,” she said. Instead, solving the world’s problems calls for business leaders to channel their “moral imagination.”

Partnering, she said, is critical for scale. She cited Acumen’s eight-year partnership with global consulting firm Bain, which includes senior partners coming into Acumen’s offices and a total of 52,000 hours of pro bono consulting, but also “reverse apprenticeships.” These involve Bain embedding its young leaders in externships at Acumen initiatives in the field—in Ethiopia, say, or post-conflict Colombia—after which they come back with a different level of understanding of things like the supply chains in which their large-corporate clients are working in. “It makes them better leaders,” she says. Continue reading →

WHAT IS TOP TALENT AND HOW IS THAT IDENTIFIED?

Posted on

As a part of our talent acquisition engagements, we ask our clients how they define “top talent” and how they would assess those traits in the interview process. Reflecting on the insightful comments we hear every day, we thought there would be great value in a new blog in which senior executives/thought leaders share their “Take on Talent.”

This is the sixteenth in a series of blogs/interviews with senior executives who are thought leaders in the areas of Talent Acquisition, Career Development and Leadership who will share their perspectives on this ever present question.

Phil Fersht is the CEO and Chief Analyst, HfS Research

Phil is an acclaimed author, analyst, and visionary in IT Services and BPO, the Digital Transformation of enterprise operations and cognitive automation strategies. Fersht coined the terms “The As-a-Service Economy” and “Digital OneOffice”, which describe HfS Research’s vision for the future of global operations and the impact of cognitive automation and disruptive digital business models. Phil was named Analyst of the Year in 2016 (see link) for the third time by the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations, which voted on 170 other leading IT industry analysts.

Prior to founding HfS in 2010, Phil has held various analyst roles for Gartner (AMR) and IDC and was BPO Marketplace leader for Deloitte Consulting across the United States, UK, and Singapore.  Over the past 20 years, Fersht has lived and worked in Europe, North-America, and Asia, where he has advised on hundreds of operations strategy, outsourcing, and global business services engagements.

Phil is also the author and creator of the most widely-read and acclaimed blog in the global services industry, entitled “Horses for Sources” now entering its eleventh year.  He regularly contributes to media such as Wall St Journal, Business Week, Economist, The Times of India and CIO Magazine and is a regular keynote speaker at major industry events, such as NASSCOM, ANDI, ABSL, Global Sourcing Association, SSON, Sourcing Interests Group and HfS Summits.

He received a Bachelor of Science, with Honors, in European Business and Technology from Coventry University, UK and a Diplôme Universitaire de Technologie in Business and Technology from the University of Grenoble, France. He also has a diploma from the Market Research Society in the UK.

Please share with us the top characteristics of the most talented people you have encountered during your career, and your definition of each. Continue reading →

What does real leadership look like?

Posted on

by Jill Griffin

I was at dinner recently with some friends and out of the blue, one of my dinner companions asked a compelling question: If something dangerous happened here in this restaurant, who do you think would step up and lead us out of here to safety?

Companies all across the globe are asking a similar question every day. If we want to go somewhere, if we want to be successful, who can we count on to step up and take us there? An endless stream of studies have been conducted, libraries of books have been written, and yet leadership still seems to be a bit of a mystery.

Can leadership be taught or is it a talent we are born with? Most companies have some kind of assessment that you have to pass to be moved into leadership. That seems democratic — anybody can take the test and so that means theoretically that anybody could pass it. This avoids the good old boy network— no more getting the job because of who you know. At least in theory, that’s how it works. And the chances of finding the right person should be better with some science sprinkled into the process. Continue reading →