Crispin (Page 7)

In: Career, Career Development

Anyone with leadership aspirations will consider the question ‘Am I Talent’ as they progress in their career. And while it is not purely a question for leaders the nature of the question is directly related to subjective nature of how others consider and measure your performance. As a subject matter expert, with specialist skills, experience and credentials it is quite clear the basis of how you are recruited or retained in a role. In sales roles, results speak for themselves and the salesperson who does not hit targets knows exactly why they are underperforming. So for leaders and aspiring leaders how do you know if you have what it takes? How do you know – ‘am I talent?’ or if I am High Potential… High Potential Firstly a caveat – you can be extremely talented and not on your organisations top talent list (sometimes referred to as High Potential orContinue Reading

WFH

In: FWOW, Leadership, Virtual Teams

Offer as much flexibility as possible sums up the new Microsoft employee guidelines for working from home and we can all learn from their example. With everyone around the world working from home for the last few months, embracing the flexible workplace just sounds logical. At Microsoft they have taken this to a new level by providing clarity in guidelines Offer As Much Flexibility As Possible The guide from Chief People Officer Kathleen Hogan, starts by explaining how empathetic she is about the emotional toil that come from the new demands of everybody working at home and often needing to contribute to home schooling at the same time. Working from home is mostly a supported choice and returning to the office is optional for employees (except for those essential onsite roles). It goes on to state that Microsoft plans to “offer as much flexibility as possible to support individual workContinue Reading

In: Career

The art of asking inquiring, challenging, powerful questions is one of the most fundamental differentiators of leadership. They challenge our basic assumptions and create awareness of patterns and connections. Powerful questions explore intentions, values, convictions, hopes, ambitions and possibilities. The quality of the questions you ask not only demonstrates an openness and curiosity for learning, a thirst for knowledge and an interest in the subject. It can also unpack the underlying drivers of situation build rapport, expose vulnerabilities or risks and identify creative opportunities. As we get older we tend to limit our view of the world we know, we blinker the areas of skill, experience, knowledge and subject matter expertise and tend to ignore, block or avoid areas we know little about. The more curious and inquiring approach that children use to learn is the same characteristic seen with genius minds able to consider much bigger questions. So whatContinue Reading

Leadership traits

In: Leadership

What makes a truly great leader? We all deal with range of different leaders every day in different parts of our lives but how many of them really inspire you – what are the traits of truly great leaders? Howard M. Shore identifies five character traits of great leaders. Integrity Having integrity means that have the strength of your convictions to put personal interests aside and ‘take the right action’. Humility Being humble and curious, recognise that personal success is almost always the result of the efforts of many others. Expressing Care Everyone deserves care, a great leader can put themselves into someone else’s place and deeply empathise with their underlying motivation and desires. Weak leaders are oblivious to others points of view and don’t care about them. Consistency Leadership consistency sets the tone for the team, erratic or inconsistent leadership behaviour creates team stress and disharmony. Influence Having aContinue Reading

In: Leadership, Motivation

Keeping your team motivated during the pandemic is a widely recognised challenge. A recent survey of 600 CEOs by HBS asked what was keeping them up at night. The answers varied slightly but the common theme was motivation. “Keeping morale and motivation up amongst employees while they are dealing with the stress of COVID-19 as well as parenting/schooling children while working from home. How can we be supportive while maximizing productivity? How do we help employees with work/life balance?” “Keeping spirits high in a sales environment. At the moment our sales force has to work twice as hard for a quarter of the results. We have reduced the expectation of results but they still feel like they are losing every day. I believe this will be a marathon, not a sprint, and I will need help for the next many months to keep theirs and others’ spirits high so weContinue Reading

In: Career, Gender, Working From Home

When organisations make large cost cutting initiatives traditionally the number of women being reduced is significantly higher than the number of men. The Australian Bureau of Statistics identified that women in Victoria lost jobs at four times the rate of men in July. If this proportion of job loss continues to skew against women we will face a gender disaster. We’ve got job losses at nearly five times the rate of men, and those women are not going to be able to return to work easily. Tanja Kovac, GenVic McKinsey have calculated that women’s jobs are 1.8 times more vulnerable than men’s jobs. Women make up 39% of global employment but equate to 54% of overall job losses. One of the main reasons is that the virus has placed a significant increase in the burden of unpaid care which is largely carried out by women. The global impact of this biasContinue Reading

In: Emotional Intelligence, Leadership

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to understand and use your own empathy and emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate efficiently and empathise with others to over come challenges and defuse conflict. Conversations always start out with small talk, and so often we revert back to a basic question something like “Hi, how are you?”. The social convention is that we often start a conversation asking this generic question and potentially don’t even wait for the answer. Researchers at Harvard Business School analyzed hundreds of conversations to determine what kinds of questions led to better reactions. The findings established that people who ask deeper more interested questions were better liked by those they were having conversations with. It also noted that individuals using this technique were rated as having a higher interpersonal construct of listening validation and care. Authentic conversations are grounded in asking a question that you care about listeningContinue Reading

In: Career, Values

Employer Values – When you look for the right job match you often consider the culture fit, but what about the value fit? An emerging term for recruitment organisations is Employee Value Proposition which captures more fully that total fit between what you stand for and what the organisation represents. Culture determines how work gets done, but values sets how a companies makes decisions, establishes priorities and represents deeper ethical qualities. “Ensuring that a company shares your values from the outset is a threefold process: First, you need to identify your own core values; next, ask the right questions during the interview process; and finally, conduct your own assessment to see if your values match those of the organization.” Kristi Hedges Divergent values may be minor and irritating such as an organisation that accepts meetings starting late if you value punctuality. Or the divergence could be more serious where yourContinue Reading

In: Creativity, Customer Centricity, Innovation

Cultural Innovation is not just about building a better mousetrap, rather it is driven by deeply connecting customers with a brands ideology, which in turn has transformed the the value proposition and reinvented the category. Why is innovation so hard? Why do companies who have have incredibly talented teams struggle to innovate and create a sustainable innovative new product? This article explores the challenges with large corporate innovation. Procter & Gamble a company renowned for driving what it refers to as ‘constructive disruption’ has designed a process that aligns closely to a startup with venture funding, support from tech entrepreneurs and a lean probe and learn prototyping process. But even with this best in class approach to corporate innovation the process is not exactly delivering huge results – the most recent P&G offering was a ‘Smart Pampers Diaper’ (nappy) that signals a change is needed! “Build a better mousetrap, andContinue Reading

In: Innovation, Open Innovation

Innovation is built using well proven methodologies, however it requires more than an effective process to motivate and inspire the imagination of an innovation team. The right leadership is central to any innovation teams success and if not managed carefully leader and team identity blocks innovation. People and particularly leadership are a very important part of a successful innovation culture and the most effective innovators need to master cultural change. A recent Harvard Business Review case study illustrates this point, Pixel a division of Deloitte Consulting provide teams of on demand talent to support client engagements. Pixel enables their clients with resources who have critical and in demand skills such as AI, Machine Learning and Data Analytics. So it is a business that is providing access to hard to find expertise and collaborating on innovation and new product development. However despite the successful completion of many projects there is still significantContinue Reading