Human-resources executives have aspired to be strategic advisers to business leaders for at least a generation. But it’s been a struggle for many because it’s so difficult to measure the business value of HR approaches. Questions such as “What is the ROI1 of training?” and “Which screening techniques yield the best performing recruits?” or “What target-setting approach will best motivate performance?” have been met with imprecise answers.

Today, however, new tools and methods for analyzing data enable HR to define the link between “people practices” and performance more effectively. This couldn’t have happened at a better time, since CEOs are hunting for value anywhere they can find it. The upshot: if you and your head of HR haven’t recently discussed ideas for using data to generate a talent strategy that’s more closely linked to business results, it’s time to start.

11th paper from the BetaCodex Network, on organizational structures and how they interact. This paper was previously entitled "The 3 Structures of an Organization".

Whenever we have a discussion about race, there are a number of points that need to be clarified from the outset.

First, that there has been a remarkable transformation in our attitudes in a relatively short period. Over the course of the last 50 years, in the UK, we have become far more accepting of minorities who are colleagues, neighbours and partners. In addition, we are far less tolerant and accepting of overtly racist behaviour.

Some commentators have concluded that this significant change in attitudes signifies that racism is on its way to being eradicated. Unfortunately, this is not the case, which leads to the second point, that we should not be too complacent or too comfortable. Racism has, like a virus, mutated: it is still present but in much more subtle ways than in the past. 

There are a number of ways this can and does occur. First, there is a suppression of overtly racist attitudes. Second, while people may not endorse stereotypes associated with minorities, they nevertheless make decisions which are influenced by them. Third, they avoid contact with minorities, so that they do not have to deal with their own racist feelings and thoughts. 

Rapid changes, economic and political upheaval, and intense pressure created a context of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) in Siemens Healthineers Latin America corporate team.
Facing these challenges, how was it possible to create a 139% increase in the number of highly engaged managers and a 46% increase in engagement scores overall?
This case study reviews outcomes of the program and key ingredients of that the company used to create this success…. starting with a foundation of a commitment to people, and leveraging emotional intelligence.

While most business leaders now believe having a diverse and inclusive culture is critical to performance, they don't always know how to achieve that goal. Here are eight powerful truths that can help turn aspirations into reality.

Diversity and inclusion continues to be a top priority for business leaders around the world, and quite rightly so. After all, ecosystems thrive on diversity, and the world of business is no different. But, the journey to building a truly diverse and inclusive workplace can often be a long and daunting one.  So, in this podcast episode we’re sharing practical tips and advice to help you drive forward the diversity agenda within your organisation.

There is a clear distinction between changing a culture and shaping a culture, as Marino noted in his workshop. “Changing means you’ve got to be different. Shaping means there’s an element of what you’re doing that you want to keep, that you want to build on.” That is what Loblaw set out to do using both Human Synergistics’ assessments for measuring attributes of organizational culture and individual behavioral styles and Senn Delaney’s culture-shaping methodology to embed the desired culture.

With 161,000 employees in more than 150 countries, Unilever operates globally and at scale. The consumer-goods group’s brands range from Lipton tea and Magnum ice cream to Surf laundry detergent and Dove skin care. Under the leadership of Paul Polman, chief executive since 2009, the Anglo-Dutch group has sought to drive growth though innovation and by actively reshaping its portfolio while reducing operational complexity and focusing on sustainability as a key theme.

Leena Nair, chief human resources officer (CHRO), joined Unilever in 1992 as a management trainee. Prior to taking on her current role, she was the group’s global head of diversity and inclusion. She says, “If you look at a competitive advantage that a company truly has, it is really only the ideas, the ingenuity, the passion of its people. Because everything else can be matched.”

New CIPD survey suggests middle managers are particularly affected, while lower-paid staff lack training and development opportunities

This blog post is the second part in a series that shares our reflections on building an experimental culture in governments - see Exploring the unobvious: An overview for an introduction. In our previous post, we discussed how governments tend to explore only a small, fairly predictable subset of solutions. We argued that they need to get outside their comfort zone and explore the unobvious to develop better outcomes. So how do you go about exploring this space of the unobvious?

The good news is that there are multiple ways to explore and develop unobvious solutions to the problems that governments are facing. The methods mentioned below (read this post for a more in-depth look at this diagram) are all contributing, in different ways and at various phases of the development process, to building new understanding and creation of solutions.

Risk aversion, weak customer focus, and siloed mind-sets have long bedeviled organizations. In a digital world, solving these cultural problems is no longer optional.

Shortcomings in organizational culture are one of the main barriers to company success in the digital age. That is a central finding from McKinsey’s recent survey of global executives (Exhibit 1), which highlighted three digital-culture deficiencies: functional and departmental silos, a fear of taking risks, and difficulty forming and acting on a single view of the customer.

In the near future, we should support students and young people in experiencing what it’s like to learn in online and in person spaces, managing projects and their own work, much like how they are living their lives.

Given this reality and given our goal of preparing young people for the world we think they may inherit, what learning experiences can and should we as educators design for? What does learning look like in the modern era?

The traditional framework for brainstorms involves identifying a problem, listing solutions within a set of parameters, and then choosing the best.

But research on creativity and innovation suggests that truly innovative solutions result not from searching for a “correct answer,” but from the collision of different ideas, perspectives and life experiences.

Rather than encouraging convergent thinking, as traditional brainstorm sessions do, the goal should be to encourage divergent thinking: the practice of finding new ways to look at a problem and generating multiple solutions. In divergent thinking, the emphasis isn’t to agree on the best idea—it’s to get as far away as possible from the most obvious answer.

A conversation with Ian Bremmer about what it will take for political and economic institutions to regain their credibility. Spoiler: It involves finding new models for solving global-scale problems.

Great organizations and leaders know that the culture stuff is the hard stuff. Culture takes time to define. It takes work to execute. Yet, if the time is spent (1) really understanding the behaviors expected throughout the organization; (2) identifying the systems and processes that will continue to help those behaviors be expressed and sustained; and (3) shaping practices that help employees and the organization become better, then you can close your culture gaps, and stop your best people from saying, “I know it’s a great culture, but I am leaving.”

This week I want to introduce you to an idea that has obsessed me for the last 5 years – Vertical Development. One of the reasons that many leadership programs don’t work is that they don’t acknowledge that there are really TWO types of development that leaders require: horizontal and vertical.

Horizontal Development – refers to the adding of more knowledge, skills, and competencies. It is about what you know, which we can assess through measurement of competencies e.g.360-degree feedback.

Vertical Development – refers to advancement in a person’s thinking capability. The outcome of vertical stage development is the ability to think in more complex, systemic, strategic, and interdependent ways. It is about how you think, which we can measure through stage assessments.

Most leaders in today’s VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) work environments are suffering not from a lack of leadership knowledge or skills – ‘How do I empower staff again?’ But from the fact their vertical altitude is inferior to the complexity of their leadership challenges. As Robert Kegan, Harvard professor of adult development, would say – they are in over their heads. And yet most leadership programs don’t include the elements which help leaders grow vertically. So what to do?

Here’s a question every leader should answer: Do you have a clear understanding of your people’s skills, and where the gaps are?

Odds are, the answer is no. Although the cloud, digitization, and the Internet of Things allow businesses to gather and analyze all sorts of data, few organizations today have a system in place to track the skills they have. And even fewer apply that knowledge to gauge what skills they lack, both now and in the future — which presents a challenge, given that in tomorrow’s automation- and data-driven workplace, talent will be scarce and the needs of your organization will change often.

If you really want a Learning Organisation you must build the capacity to change the internal dialogue. It is dialogue that has created who we are and only a change in our dialogue will change that. To change the dialogue means much more than changing the topic of conversation, you’ll rarely manage that over any period of time. (Networks will decide on their topic of conversation based on their sense of identity.) Instead the route is to change the relationships within and between networks, across silos and across the organisational boundary. This is not the crude and crass ‘cut and paste’ of organisational restructures. This is a qualitative change in how people are in relationship with each other, how they decide what matters, how they respond to new information and new people.

When you are prepared to embark on this you rapidly uncover deep learning. Kurt Lewin said that you never really understand a system until you try to change it. As you begin to try and change things, you provoke a reaction from people’s sense of organisational identity that tells you where the real work lies. Your first attempts at change are never successful in anything more than pointing you at where you really need to do your work. Too often at that point we step away feeling our job is done. This is never short work and nor is it for the faint of heart.

There is an upside and downside for each type of organizational culture. Some people think one type of culture is better than others. But overemphasis brings out the downside of any culture, as Nose Dive demonstrated.
The upside of a collaborative culture is the ability to achieve greater heights – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But too much collaboration and you end up with group think.  The upside of a competitive culture is individual excellence and delivering results that meet customer needs, but the downside is burnout and stress.
A bureaucratic culture’s upside is operational excellence. But if it’s overdone, you get bogged down in red tape. The upside of an entrepreneurial culture is flexibility and creativity. The downside is chaos.

As the power of the individual grows, modern employees want more flexibility and autonomy in how they work and learn. We are now in the Age of the Individual.

Whilst many L&D professionals do recognise this, they just don’t know how to enable and support continuous independent learning, and more often than not try to force-fit it it into the traditional training model – by trying to capture and manage everything in some sort of central enterprise learning management system or “learning platform”. Whereas an enterprise platform might be relevant to keep track of (mandatory) corporate training, it is just not appropriate to use it to try to manage an individual’s professional learning.

In other words, the traditional, top down, one-size-fits-all, command-and-control approach to workplace learning – which organizations have been using for more than 100 years – is just not up to the new world of work. What it requires is a new workplace learning model.

The Employee-Centred Learning & Development (ECLD) Model – turns everything on its head. Here an employee’s professional learning and development lies at the very centre of the model. It is something they organise in a privately owned learning space and evidence in a privately owned digital portfolio. It is the role of their manager to enable the growth and development of all the members of his/her whole team, and the role of L&D to work with both managers and individuals to support all this – as summarised on the diagram below.

True or false: the principles of leadership development work regardless of location. 

Answer: false. 

This surprised me, but this is what I have learned from researching leadership development in Silicon Valley.  

Here, the speed of change is more rapid than in other places. Talent is in short supply, so there is immense competition for the same people. Tech leaders are younger in age than other industries, so development needs to happen faster. This calls for learning that is more accelerated and continuous than previous models of development.  

Key to developing leaders in this high impact environment are the following seven practices: 

Companies need to approach gender inequality as they would any business problem: with hard data. Most programs created to combat gender inequality are based on anecdotal evidence or cursory surveys. But to tailor a solution to a company’s specific problems, you need to seek data to answer fundamental questions such as “When are women dropping out?” and “Are women acting differently than men in the office?” and “What about our company culture has limited women’s growth?” When organizations implement a solution, they need to measure the outcomes of both behavior and advancement in the office. Only then can they transition from the debate about the causes of gender inequality (bias versus behavior) and advance to the needed stage of a solution.

Humans are problem solvers - we are good at fixing things and we are compelled to do so as a means of survival. My favourite discovery in Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow was that humans have an in-built desire for shortcuts - a drive to solve problems using the least possible amount of effort. We prefer to use the information we have in front of us and don’t naturally seek additional information.

I wondered whether this desire for shortcuts could help to explain the ubiquitous ‘fix-it’ culture that we see in our public services. Does our innate drive to reach solutions quickly (amongst other obvious influences such as social and organisational pressures) play a role?

Add empathy into the mix and our desire to ‘fix’ things may be perpetuated further. As a practising clinical psychologist, I find it hardest to resist offering solutions when people appear to be struggling the most – as if empathy intensifies the urge to ‘fix’. We don’t want people to suffer – so it makes sense to find an answer and fast!

But is this the most helpful response? In some situations a fast solution is appropriate, such as with urgent medical care. But if a person has a more complex problem to solve, then a question is likely to be more useful than an answer.

Developing leadership to improve relationships and accelerate change is a key goal in many organizations, so what’s the secret that helped 73% of leaders in this global tech company measurably improve?
Excelitas is a global technology company with R&D and 19 manufacturing facilities around the world.  To improve performance, the company set out to strengthen the leadership skills that would improve workplace climate to strengthen employee engagement. Recognizing that emotional intelligence would be a valuable ingredient in this initiative, company partnered with Six Seconds to develop a program measurably improve leadership. This case study reviews outcomes of the program and key ingredients that the company used to create this success.

The mismatch between leadership development as it exists and what leaders actually need is enormous and widening. What would work better?

Over the last 16 years I have carried out research into how leaders create change, and I’ve worked in the change leadership field for 25 years in multinational corporations. Over that time, I’ve come to appreciate four factors that lie at the heart of good, practical leadership development: making it experiential; influencing participants’ “being,” not just their “doing”; placing it into its wider, systemic context; and enrolling faculty who act less as experts and more as Sherpas.