Rethinking the Role of Leaders in the Creative Process

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by Spencer Harrison, INSEAD, and Elizabeth Rouse, Boston College

A strong vision and a more disciplined approach can actually equal more creative results.

How does a modern dance choreographer get the most creativity out of their troupe? In such an artistic setting, you might imagine that their main focus is to encourage and inspire individual dancers to express their creativity and weave it into the final performance.

Most of the research on managing creative teams over the last 30 years would agree. Findings indicate that a team leader should focus on supporting the team members’ individual creativity.

It is perhaps not surprising that leaders are typically seen as the lynchpin and not the source of creativity. But what happens when the leader is the person with the creative idea, and they need team members’ support in executing that idea?

Our research with modern dance choreographers suggests that leaders actually have an important role to play in contributing ideas, not just supporting other peoples’ creativity. Indeed, our study suggests that a team managed by a stronger, more centralised project leader who drives the process and has their own clear ideas can produce results that are both on time and ultimately more creative. Continue reading →

Google’s chief diversity officer reflects on being inclusive in year 3 of remote work

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Melonie Parker reflects on what the company learned about putting flexibility and inclusion first in hybrid work, while also improving productivity and collaboration

 

 

 

 

It’s been two years since the vast majority of people started working from home due to COVID-19. As we move into a more flexible future of work, a hybrid approach will be the new norm for many companies, including Google. At its core, this means bringing people back together in ways that can work for everyone—giving employees more choice and flexibility, while ensuring teams are being set up for success.

As hybrid work continues to gain popularity, companies must be mindful of the challenges it can present if not done inclusively. A recent survey found a strong preference for remote or hybrid work among employees of color, caregivers, and women. Working in the office shouldn’t overshadow the impact an employee makes wherever they may be. We have a responsibility to make sure every employee continues to feel included and has the same opportunity to advance as their colleagues who may be in the office more frequently.

At Google, we’ve learned some valuable lessons over the past two years about how to put flexibility and inclusion first in a hybrid work environment, while also improving productivity and collaboration. Three key themes have emerged from our research and experiences.

BUILD COLLABORATION EQUITY

Maintaining virtual connections will remain important as more companies embrace hybrid work long-term. In a hybrid workplace, it is imperative that teams build collaboration equity, in which all employees have the tools, access, and information they need to work together with their teams and be effective at their jobs. Here’s a few examples:

Continue reading →

Four Ways To Make Work Better For Women

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by Becky Schmitt, Cognizant’s Chief People Officer.

As the mom of three children, I’ll be honest: I struggled with being a working mother for the first 10 years of my career. I never felt “good enough” at work or at home. I tried multiple tactics — working part-time, taking a demotion, working more hours. At times, I felt lost in my direction and considered side-lining my professional ambitions completely.

If I’d started out as a working mom in today’s work environment, I might have found balance more quickly. Many companies now offer more advanced programs to support and develop women’s careers, as well as new flexible work options helpful to any woman in a caretaker role. It took a lot of lonely trial and error, self-reflection and mentorship before I found my groove.

We’ve come a long way, but at the same time, the pandemic has disproportionately affected working women. Companies need to reflect on how they support the professional growth of women in the workforce, especially as we return to a more business-as-usual environment.

A women-welcome workplace

Here are a few principles businesses need to keep in mind in when designing their people programs to be supportive of working women:

1. Reach women where they are

The traditional constructs of work can be limiting for women.especially those in caretaking roles. Companies need to think through the life stages and experiences of working women and be innovative in offering programs to support them.

One of the ways we’ve done this at Cognizant is through our Cognizant Returnship Program, which recruits individuals who’ve taken a multi-year career break (often to raise a child or care for family) back into the workforce. The decision to return to the working world can be daunting. As one of our participants put it, “My mind was full of self doubts. Will I be able to do justice to my work and to my duties at home? There has been a paradigm shift in the tech sector. Will I be relevant?” Continue reading →

Thriving at work in the post-pandemic world

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by Darren Overfield and Wanda T. Wallace

Leaders can take four steps to show employees how valued they are and ease the trauma of COVID-19.

Let’s call the past two years what they have been: a collective trauma. We haven’t always labeled it as such because we tend to think of trauma as a horrendous experience, like war or a physical attack, that happens to a discrete set of people. However, in organizations across every industry, the impact of the last two years has a lot in common with what would widely be considered traumatic events.

In our work as consultants in the workplace, and in the academic research on the topic, we see people exhibiting a decreased capacity to deal with emotions (their own and others’), increased displays of anger, higher rates of anxiety and depression, difficulty concentrating, and memory problems. We believe one of the key drivers of the “great resignation” is the trauma we have been through. So how can leaders and managers help people reduce anxiety and regain balance and energy?

Moving forward after any trauma depends in large part on both feeling heard and sharing common experiences. We know that these two workplace conditions are essential for employees to feel engaged and do their best work. According to a May 2021 study by Glint, a company that creates employee engagement platforms, the top two drivers of a work culture in which employees are happy, satisfied, and engaged are (1) an opportunity to learn and grow and (2) a sense of belonging. Researchers reached these conclusions after analyzing millions of responses from 629 companies on Glint’s platforms and studying more than 275,000 job postings from 375 organizations on LinkedIn. Continue reading →

Make the “new manager bounce” work for you

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by Ben Lyttleton

Turning around the fortunes of a soccer team requires a special combination of skills. Leaders of all kinds could benefit from studying them.

When an organization’s performance starts to decline, at least one if not three things need to change: strategy, culture, and talent. In soccer, the go-to method to stop a run of bad results is a change at the top. The expectation is that the appointment of a new manager to coach the team will strengthen strategy, improve culture, and upgrade talent.

That’s a big ask for one person. But in the current English Premier League season, which started in August 2021, eight of the managers in the 20-team league have already been replaced, close to a 50% turnover at the top. Five went in October alone. And this pattern of firing and hiring persists even though research suggests that there is only a brief “new manager bounce” before results return to what they’d been.

“The new manager doesn’t usually cause the swing,” write Simon Kuper and Professor Stefan Szymanski in their best-selling book Soccernomics. “He’s just its beneficiary.” Poor results can happen because of bad luck, a tough schedule, more injuries than usual, or other factors beyond the manager’s control.

So why do team owners continue to bring in new managers? Some recent arrivals can change strategy for the better in the long run; others can improve the culture. And given the right budget, incoming managers also usually have an eye on what talent the team is missing. Rarely can one person do all three.

Here are a few lessons on managerial succession from the English Premier League that might also ring true in the C-suite. Continue reading →