Tag Archives: Leadership

Keeping your team innovative requires leadership finesse

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By Dr. Rachel MK Headley

Although often draped in HR-y words like “retention,” the success of your team is entirely in your hands. Their ability to execute on your vision is a choice that you make, and knowing how to leverage their strengths based on who they are will revolutionize your approach to leading your team.

 

 

The Challenge

I count myself among a growing group of entrepreneurial CEOs. We work crazy hours, want to create constantly and are eager to solve problems.

Entrepreneurial CEOs have special challenges when it comes to leading their team. There’s a constant level of change within their organizations. And, although your team knows that there is a dull roar of constant new ideas, this level of chaos can be difficult for your team to maintain for any length of time.

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The Structures That Can Support Your Digital Journey

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by Charles Galunic

We regularly hear that digitisation efforts have to be driven from the top. They need management attention and an end-to-end plan that makes digital part of the organisational DNA. But what this actually means is rarely articulated. The structural arrangements companies make to digitise are as important as the decision to follow a path of digitisation in the first place.

As we discovered in interviews with executives at the forefront of the digital journey for a recent research article, digitisation often starts in small pockets, special teams or special units (often in IT departments, for better or worse). But these efforts are unlikely to become part of the core business until management sets some clear, high-level policies and structures (i.e. fully connected to line management).

The problem with budding digital projects is that they often lack legitimacy, power and integration with the core business. Therefore, concrete strategic commitments need to be made from the top that allow these pockets of growth to scale and become part of the firm’s core operations.

If we take e-books as an example, one of our interviewees from a large global publishing house told us: “Publishers were not positive about e-books… They didn’t think it was going to make them a lot of money, which it didn’t initially.” More importantly, it wasn’t part of their scorecard and incentives. It took substantial (widespread) changes in top management incentives and the creation of a common policy on how to deal with agents and authors, for electronic books to really take off in this organisation: “There was a certain tipping point where they just started accepting this as another format.”

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Senior Level Manager for Payroll Tax

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The Payroll Tax Senior Manager is responsible for the oversight of all payroll tax processes Federal, State, and Local and will be responsible for Corporate Payroll Stock Accounting.

 

 

Key Responsibilities:

  • Manage the payroll tax team in delivering customer service, including responding to inquiries related to payroll from our client, properties, workers and various internal departments
  • Ensure payroll tax compliance, including tax deposits, filings, and reconciliations to the general ledger are accurate and completed in a timely manner
  • Monitor tax law changes and partner with client on interpretation and implementation.
  • Oversee all tax filings for Fed, State and Local jurisdictions, provides recommendation to the client based on tax changes and publications.
  • Responsible for all payroll tax and stock accounting for all US based properties and US corporate offices.
  • Collaborate in development, testing, and troubleshooting of all system changes with the client, IT, etc. as it relates to payroll tax
  • Implement continuous process improvement to include the adoption of best practices, and updating standard operating procedures accordingly
  • Engage with senior management and be the subject matter expert for payroll and payroll tax-related matters, expatriates, 1099 reporting matters, payroll general ledger mapping/reporting.
  • Ensure the proper controls and procedures are in place, documented and followed as well as working with internal audit in testing the effectiveness of the controls

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How a Superstar Affects Your Ratings

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by Gavin Cassar

Subjectively evaluating people can have long-lasting effects.

Imagine yourself speed dating.

The first person sits across from you and the attraction is instant. You begin chatting and find the words come easily. In fact, they pour out. As the minutes melt away, you realise you’ve probably never felt this deeply connected to anyone before. But then, time is up, and you are suddenly staring into the face of a new stranger.

How much of a fair chance does this new person have to make a good impression on you? Alternatively, how would your perception of this second date change had your first interaction been a total dud? The quality of that first interaction influences the way we judge future, similar experiences.

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Empathy is an essential leadership skill — and there’s nothing soft about it

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by  Prudy Gourguechon

I get tired of hearing about “soft skills,” even when it’s acknowledged they are important. No less a hard-muscled body than the U.S. Army, in its Army Field Manual on Leader Development (one of the best resource on leadership I’ve ever seen) insists repeatedly that empathy is essential for competent leadership.

 

Why? Empathy enables you to know if the people you’re trying to reach are actually reached. It allows you to predict the effect your decisions and actions will have on core audiences and strategize accordingly. Without empathy, you can’t build a team or nurture a new generation of leaders. You will not inspire followers or elicit loyalty. Empathy is essential in negotiations and sales: it allows you to know your target’s desires and what risks they are or aren’t willing to take.

Elsewhere I’ve proposed a short list of 5 essential cognitive capacities and personality traits that every leader who assumes great responsibility must have. Empathy is one of the core five. (The others are self-awareness, trust, critical thinking and discipline/self-control.)

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