Author Archives: Larry Janis

HOW TO IMPROVE AGILITY IN LEADERSHIP

 

 

  by Tresha Moreland

Do you ever feel stuck as a leader? You want to make changes quickly and effortlessly, but you feel as though you are trapped in quicksand and are sinking quickly.  This makes it difficult to promote innovation or to be prepared for any unforeseen obstacles.

If this describes you, enhancing leadership agility is an important first step. The capacity to adapt, pick up new skills, and take advantage of your team’s strengths is agility in leadership. It is the capacity to articulate a compelling future vision to your team in a clear and effective manner. It is the capacity to change quickly in a variety of contexts, including strategy, operations, people, and oneself.

However, how do you increase your agility and become a more effective leader? Here are key steps for consideration.

DEVELOP A CLEAR AND COMPELLING VISION

Having a unique and appealing vision of the future is the first step in developing your agility. What do you want? What are your objectives? What values do you hold? What kind of impact do you want to have on the world? You can better align your actions and choices with the goal and vision of your organization if you have a clear vision for it. Additionally, it will encourage and drive your team to strive for greatness and conquer challenges. You must be open to criticism and willing to modify your vision in response to new facts or evolving circumstances if you want to establish a clear vision. Additionally, you must effectively convey your vision to your team through stories, analogies, and feelings. (more…)

Are Multiple Job Interview Rounds Really Necessary?

 

 

 

by Chengyi Lin

 

How companies can simplify the process without compromising their evaluation of candidates.

While it’s critical for companies to thoroughly assess potential hires, the length of the job interview process seems to be increasing. On LinkedIn, you’ll find numerous stories of candidates undergoing anything from nine to 12 rounds of interviews in their quest to secure a role – only for their application to be unsuccessful.

The time it takes for an organisation to make a new hire has reached an all-time high, as reported by human capital advisory firm The Josh Bersin Company and global talent solutions business AMS. Beyond unfavourable macro conditions beyond a firm’s direct control, much of the culpability for drawn-out, cumbersome interview processes falls on the companies themselves.

A prolonged process – say, one that stretches over two months from start to finish – doesn’t just cause psychological stress for candidates, but also has practical implications for firms. Vacant roles remain unfilled, which can be a drain on both time and resources. Candidates can become frustrated and withdraw their application, causing the company to lose out on a good hire.

One reason for conducting so many interviews could be that firms are just not adequately prepared when they begin the hiring process. A lack of internal alignment and entangled politics increase the complexity and slow things down. Leaner headcounts – especially in HR departments – due to recent layoffs could also mean that individuals without the proper knowledge of how to interview candidates are being asked to step up without sufficient preparation.

Inefficient stakeholder management could also be at play. Some firms require multiple individuals to meet and sign off on a hiring decision, which may be advantageous for reasons of equity and diversity. But this can prolong things if too many people with similar profiles are involved.

There is also immense cost and performance pressure to hire the right candidate – one that can execute the role, is an organisational fit and will remain in the firm for at least a year (or, ideally, longer). Hiring managers and HR executives could therefore feel the need to put a candidate through the wringer to ensure that they are making the right choice.

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Why you should build a “Career Portfolio” (not a “Career Path”)

 

 

 

by April Rinne

 

Every four years, something inside me shifts. I get restless and want to learn something new or apply my skills in a new way. It’s as though I shed a professional skin and start over, fresh.

In my 20s, I got all kinds of flak for this. When I decided to guide hiking trips rather than join a consulting firm, my peers said that my resume made no sense. When I opted to defer graduate school to travel in India, my mentors questioned my seriousness and said my professional future could crash.

I felt like something was wrong with me because I was interested in so many things while my friends were laser-focused on climbing the corporate ladder. It’s not that I wasn’t disciplined or willing to work hard. There was just too much worth learning and doing. To settle on one pursuit seemed like a mistake.

Today, the world has changed in some amazing and profound ways. Broadening your career focus and professional identity is no longer seen as abnormal. It’s celebrated. The macro forces driving the future of work demand independent and adaptable thinkers. When we add in the potential for automation to transform jobs en masse, the Great Resignation, and the growing number of hybrid offices around the world, it’s clear that the time is ripe to rethink what a successful career path looks like.

Up until this point, we have lacked the language necessary to design our careers in ways that veer from the traditional script. But now there is hope. A new vocabulary is emerging. At the heart of it is a shift from pursuing a “career path” to creating your “career portfolio.” This term was originally coined by philosopher and organizational behavior expert Charles Handy in the 1990s, and is poised to finally enter its prime today.

What is a career portfolio?
The term portfolio comes from the Italian words portare (to carry) + folio (sheet of paper). People often think of a portfolio in terms of finance, business, or art. For example:

  • Investors build investment portfolios to diversify their holdings and mitigate risk.
  • Financial advisors recommend a portfolio that includes equities, bonds, and cash.
  • Executives often use portfolio theory (pioneered by BCG’s product-portfolio matrix in the 1970s) to analyze their business units, strategy, and foresight. The purpose of their portfolio is to manage risk and return into the future.
  • Office managers and HR leaders use portfolios to stay organized.
  • Artists throw open their portfolio to show works they’re really proud of — the canvas of their lives.

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A New Approach to Writing Job Descriptions

 

 

 

by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez

 

 

Jobs today are changing fast, and traditional job descriptions can’t keep up. As new technologies disrupt processes and require new skills, and as companies are moving toward more and more project-based work, we are beginning to see the evolution of job descriptions away from static, holistic prescriptions that follow an employee for years to dynamic guidance that changes based on needs.

For example, a company that hired an employee for a certain set of tasks might find that four months later, a different set of tasks takes strategic priority. Even though that employee has the right skills for the new tasks, the employee can point to their job description to decline to do the new task by saying that it wasn’t what they were hired to do — or, if they take on the new tasks, their job description becomes quickly out of date.

This article is one in a series on “Creative Resilience: Leading in an Age of Discontinuity,” the theme of the 15th annual Global Peter Drucker Forum. See the conference program here.

Because most job descriptions are firmly embedded in the employee’s core area of work, they also tend to encourage silos in the organization by discouraging cross-functional collaboration. Rigid job descriptions also discourage experimentation with new technologies that may have been unimaginable at the time the description was written. And finally, narrow job descriptions can mean that an employee isn’t able to fulfill the full range of their talents at work, leaving them dissatisfied.

In response, companies are starting to approach job descriptions in new, more flexible ways based on outcomes, skills, and teams. I’ll describe each of these in turn, but first let’s look at how job descriptions came to be what we know them as today, and what they do.

Why Job Descriptions? (more…)

Solving the Problem of Remote Work

 

 

 

by Mark Mortensen

A framework to help leaders approach the topic more holistically and effectively.

 

The discussion around remote work — which has dominated news headlines, Slack conversations and water-cooler chats since countries relaxed their Covid-19 guidelines — is only getting more contentious. Many workers wish to continue working remotely in some capacity, while insisting that leaders’ productivity concerns are unfounded.

However, some high-profile executives have been vocal about their opposition. Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman declared that working remotely “is not an employee choice”. And Elon Musk denounced remote work as “morally wrong”. He further suggested that those working from home are merely “phoning it in” and mandated a return-to-office (RTO) at Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter).

One consistent aspect of the arguments for and against remote work is how strong and entrenched these stances are. And although conflicting perspectives on the topic are nothing new, tensions seem to be escalating.

Amazon workers conducted a walkout to protest their company’s RTO policies, Google recently began tracking employees’ in-office attendance and Farmers Insurance workers have threatened to unionise or quit over the CEO’s reversal of the company’s remote work policy. What’s more, stories of employees being terminated for failing to comply with RTO mandates continue to proliferate.

Amid increasing polarisation, it becomes even more difficult for employers and employees to reach a consensus on the best way forward. As I wrote in a recent article for Harvard Business Review, leaders and employees should actively collaborate to devise a balanced approach to the issue and arrive at a mutually beneficial solution — one that recognises and validates the needs and concerns of both sides.        (more…)