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By Kristin Stoller

For as long as Keyla Cabret can remember, diversity has been a priority at Aflac. Years before companies started boasting equity and inclusion initiatives, the insurance giant was creating diverse pipelines, recruiting Black high school students in Columbus, Georgia, for its internship program.

That’s how Cabret got her start at the company: In 1995, the then high school sophomore worked two hours a day as a part-time human resources intern. Some 26 years later, she’s come full circle as Aflac’s director of diversity, equity and inclusion.

“It’s been a life-building investment. That was an investment in me and the program the company had. I’m really proud of the foresight we had,” she says. “For young professionals like myself, there has always been an opportunity here. I’ve never had an issue of seeing myself in a lead role. I’ve had plenty of examples of success.”

Those examples still exist today. At the end of 2020, Aflac reported that 46% of its U.S. employees are from underrepresented communities, while 65% are women. And roughly 64% of the company’s board is made up of individuals from both of these groups.

Continue reading →

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by Adam Bryant

Many powerful forces push high-performers into bigger jobs. But we should ask if that’s the right move.

If you are good at your job, all sorts of push–pull forces within your organization—and society at large—will propel you into bigger roles with more responsibilities, including managing people for the first time or taking on larger teams.

And many people understandably want those bigger jobs, and the reasons go beyond the pay bump that often comes with promotions. It’s called a career ladder for a reason: it’s something to climb. As human beings, we are wired to strive for greater status, and all the markers that come with it: titles, more pay, and a better office (at least, back in the day when people had offices). Social media platforms amplify that dynamic, because we share our titles with the world.

Within organizations, there can also be an assumption that all high-performers want to move higher. So, as managers assess and develop talent to be future leaders, the default belief at many companies is that people will want to move up—a point that I hadn’t quite appreciated until I interviewed Shawna Erdmann, the senior vice president of learning at Comcast, the telecommunications multinational based in Philadelphia. Continue reading →

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by Michael Jarrett

Interactions between the chief executive and other members of the top management team appear to follow distinct scripts. Managers who take note can boost their standing or stay out of harm’s way.

Top management teams (TMT) have been studied since at least the 1980s for insights into how chief executives and their deputies make the strategic decisions that can make or break organisations. But little is known about what exactly happens in the decision-making process, which more often than not is steeped in politics and power play. This article is about a ground-breaking study we conducted that filmed and analysed verbal and non-verbal exchanges in TMT meetings as they happened.

Our findings, published in a new paper, suggest that, contrary to previous research that highlighted the influence of stable, longstanding alliances in organisations, coalition-building in TMTs can also be in-the-moment and fluid. By forming even temporary coalitions with other TMT members and deploying simple influencing behaviours, senior managers can persuade the CEO to take their side and sway key decisions.

Reading the room right

We studied two TMTs similar in size, gender composition and other key dimensions. TMT A belonged to a medium-sized computer game company based in Canada while the other, TMT B, was the top team of a business services company with global operations. Continue reading →

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by Christina Wood

A mentoring relationship can be a very rewarding experience for everyone involved. IT leaders offer advice on how to get started and how to ensure your mentoring efforts pay off.

No matter where you are in your career path, a terrific mentor can help you take on bigger roles, gain insight into technical challenges, and become a better leader. Being a mentor, too, is an important career move — and not only because it looks good on your CV and flatters your ego.

Mentoring can help you hire quality staff, create knowledge on your current team, keep employees  from leaving, and boost everyone’s job satisfaction. It is a learning opportunity — for mentor and mentee — unlike any other. But how do you establish a mentorship, and do it well once you get there? And how do you encourage and enable the people on your teams to do it, too?

Asking someone to be your mentor or offering to be someone’s mentor can be more awkward than asking someone out on a date. That social anxiety about dating has spawned an industry of advice columnists, books, and sitcoms to help people navigate it. How about mentoring?

I asked skilled mentors for pointers on how they initiate a mentorship, what they talk about, and whether there’s an app to help connect mentors and mentees.

This is what they told me. Continue reading →

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By Kate Morgan

The ‘Great Resignation’, which has seen millions of people leave their positions, has put US job vacancies at a 20-year high and left companies scrambling for recruits. The narrative around this mass exodus has largely been that employers failed employees, so they’re going elsewhere to find better options.

But better doesn’t always mean more money; more often, it means a better benefits package. Employees are increasingly seeking a new set of perks to match their actual needs, and bargaining for the things that really matter to them, like improved leave policies and flexible working.

Of course, while companies have a vested interest in maintaining happy, healthy employees, the bottom line still reigns supreme. But in the wake of the pandemic – and the way it’s shaken up the employment market – companies and workers are finding themselves in a new kind of negotiation, as employees figure out what’s reasonable to ask for, and companies decide how much to give.

Benefits for individuals

Although workers are looking for additional support across the globe, this issue is especially crucial in the US, where many workers count on their employers for assistance and healthcare access that isn’t provided for on a government level. Continue reading →