#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

How inclusive or exclusive should organizations be when developing their employees’ talents? In a world of unlimited resources, organizations would surely invest in everyone. After all, as Henry Ford is credited as saying, “the only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.” In the real world, however, limited budgets force organizations to be much more selective, which explains the growing interest in high potential (HiPo) identification. An employee’s potential sets the upper limits of his or her development range — the more potential they have, the quicker and cheaper it is to develop them.

Scientific studies have long suggested that investing in the right people will maximize organizations’ returns. In line with Pareto’s principle, these studies show that across a wide range of tasks, industries, and organizations, a small proportion of the workforce tends to drive a large proportion of organizational results, such that:

How many people do you know who seem to have an amazing job and workplace…but are still miserable every day? Their office is brand new—beautiful, tall-ceilinged, spick-and-span. They’ve got coffee and juices and gym memberships at their fingertips (at no cost, of course), and an on-site masseuse or childcare specialist. They may even have unlimited vacation time or work-from-home days. Yet, something is off. Even though the office is saturated with top-of-the-line perks, something is missing—a spark that could inspire them to truly love what they do.

That missing spark, as you probably know, comes down to culture. Organizations with great cultures provide certain benefits that perks-saturated workplaces can’t deliver. These are the things that build the kind of workplaces that inspire loyalty, happiness, health, and greatness. And they’re not usually things that break the bank, either. Keep reading to discover the top traits, we’ve found, that make a great culture—along with examples from businesses that embody each one. Has your organization embraced them yet?

Defined hierarchy. Commanding leadership. These corporate ligaments secure firms in the face of threats and unify them against competition. Few beliefs are more widely held in business.

The intuition, though, is wrong. “When you look at real organizations, having a clear hierarchy within your firm actually makes people turn on each other when they face an outside threat,” says Lindred Greer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Effective teamwork against threats requires not hierarchy, but egalitarianism; not centralized power, but a culture in which all voices count.

Along with Lisanne van Bunderen of the University of Amsterdam and Daan Van Knippenberg of Drexel University, the research team teased out this finding through two complementary studies. In the first study, an experiment, teams of three students developed and pitched a consultancy project to a prospective client. Some of these teams were non-hierarchical, while members of other teams arbitrarily received titles: senior consultant, consultant, junior consultant. Likewise, some teams faced no rivals, while others were told they were competing with a rival firm for clients. The researchers found that the subset of hierarchical teams facing competition with rival firms struggled with infighting while the egalitarian teams cooperated on their work.