Why your ‘personality’ is getting in the way of a promotion

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by Marisa Taylor

One of my “favorite” – ie just plain awful – recent stories to expose the staggering tone deafness around gender parity came courtesy of John Greenhouse, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He was sharing some supposedly helpful advice for women seeking equality in the business world.

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Greenhouse suggested that in order for women to rise above unconscious gender bias online, they ought to go by their initials and hide the fact that they’re women. Female readers weren’t so thrilled by the suggestion that they should be the ones responsible for fixing male bias against them.

For better advice, look to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where 48% of the incoming freshmen at the School of Computer Science are women, far greater than the national average of 18%. Rather than urging women to change their behavior, the school changed the culture by launching a faculty-run mentorship group for female computer science students, which “opens doors for women across campus through networking ”, according to the college newspaper. That has attracted increasingly more women to apply to the program. Continue reading →

Give Your Team More-Effective Positive Feedback

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Christine-Porath by Christine Porath

Research shows that one of the best ways to help employees thrive is to give them feedback. It’s one of the primary levers leaders have to increase a sense of learning and vitality. Giving your direct reports regular updates on personal performance, as well as on how the business is doing, helps them feel valued. Negative or directive feedback provides guidance, leading people to become, over time, more certain about their behavior and more confident in their competence.

Highlighting an employee’s strengths can help generate a sense of accomplishment and motivation. A Gallup survey found that 67% of employees whose managers focused on their strengths were fully engaged in their work, as compared to only 31% of employees whose managers focused on their weaknesses. IBM’s WorkTrends survey of over 19,000 workers in 26 countries, across industries and thousands of organizations, revealed that the engagement level of employees who receive recognition is almost three times higher than the engagement level of those who do not. The same survey showed that employees who receive recognition are also far less likely to quit. Recognition has been shown to increase happiness at work in general and is tied to cultural and business results, such as job satisfaction and retention. Continue reading →

The 5 Elements of a Strong Leadership Pipeline

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By Josh Bersin

Investments in traditional leadership development are often misguided and a waste of money.

It’s not that development itself isn’t important. In a Deloitte study of 7,000 organizations this year, 89% of executives rated “strengthening the leadership pipeline” an urgent issue. That’s up from 86% last year, and the trend makes sense. Organizations are continuously promoting people into management, and those new leaders struggle with the transition. To help them in their new roles, companies spend almost $14 billion a year on courses, books, videos, coaches, tests, and executive education programs — and such spending rose 10% last year.

But there’s little evidence that much of this works. Barbara Kellerman from Harvard, Jeffrey Pfeffer from Stanford, and numerous other experts have pointed out that the development market is filled with fads — slick behavioral models and fun, engaging tools — that don’t really move the needle. Continue reading →

Workplace Excellence Can Be Contagious

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Image resultby Serguei Netessine

Collective outcomes soar when top performers mingle with less adept colleagues.

Big data is helping us learn much more about what drives sales in the digital environment. The traditional service sector, however, remains very much a “black box”. A physical sales environment, such as a clothing store or restaurant, is subject to even more intangible elements than e-commerce sites or apps – perhaps chief among them are the extremely nuanced and significant interactions between customers and staff. Attributing customer purchases to actions taken by an individual employee is ambiguous enough without considering how additional subtleties, such as cross-employee interactions and influence, may affect outcomes.
Continue reading →

Should You Chat Informally Before an Interview?

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by Brian Swider, Brad Harris,Murray Barrick

 

photo_uniqueJob interviews typically begin with a set of seemingly innocuous questions unrelated to the job: How is your day going? Got any plans for the weekend? How was traffic on your way in?

It is commonly assumed that job candidates and interviewers both prefer to start with these types of questions rather than just diving into the more rigid and formal structured interview topics. After all, small talk is typically how most interactions between strangers begin. Interviewers also believe these little interactions, academically referred to as “rapport building,” help to loosen up nervous job candidates and lead to candid responses in the subsequent job-related questioning. (Note: Although this premise is intuitive, research has yet to substantiate it.) Continue reading →