Does Your Boss Know Your Strengths and Help You Pursue New Roles Based on Those Skills?

Source: https://www.skillscaravan.com

Has one of your former bosses identified your (perhaps previously undiscovered) strengths and helped you pursue new roles that were well-suited to those capabilities? If so, you are very fortunate. The benefits from having such a boss may be significant and long-lasting.

In today's Wall Street Journal, University of Chicago Professor Virginia Minni explains the findings from a well-designed study of managers at a large multinational company.  She identified "top managers" as those who were promoted much faster than their peers.  She explains her methodology and results:

Here is how it worked. Let’s say two different teams of comparable workers have a regular boss (in other words, not a top manager). Then the managers rotate, and one of those two teams gets a top-performing leader while the other team gets another lesser chief. Since the two teams are otherwise the same, the manager would be responsible for any changes in performance.

The results were striking. For one thing, employees who had contact with a high-quality manager were much more likely to make a lateral move within the firm—about 40% more likely than other workers, within seven years of being assigned to a top manager. These weren’t trivial moves, either: They often involved large changes, such as moving between completely different roles at the company.

That leads to the next striking difference in performance. The workers who served under a top manager and changed jobs were much better paid and much more productive than other workers. Within seven years of contact with a top manager, these people earned about 13% more than workers with lower-performing managers. And their performance metrics—like sales per capita—were 16% higher than other workers’ numbers.

Minni discovered that the effects endured, meaning that the workers did not just benefit while working for the highly effective boss.  They continued to excel in their career after shifting roles and working for different leaders.  She finds that these excellent bosses spent more time in one-on-one meetings with workers, which she argues helped these leaders match their employees with the right roles moving forward.  Moreover, they coached people to excel in those new roles.  

While the study may not offer earth-shattering (or even mildly surprising) results, it does document in a very rigorous way the impact of having an excellent boss who looks out for your interests.  What I would add is that some managers are not bad at leading their current teams, but they do hoard talent.  In other words, they are not always looking out for the interests of their team members.  They would rather hold on to talented individuals, rather than helping them find the next great role that could advance their career.  The best leaders create high-performing teams, but they also develop their people and help them secure great new opportunities.  Because they know how to identify and develop talent, these great leaders don't worry about losing that talent.  They are able to find new people who they can coach and develop to replace the people who have shifted to new roles.  

When Layoffs Occur, Who Else Leaves?

Source: Moneycontrol.com

Lisa Ward of the Wall Street Journal reports today on a fascinating new study by Sima Sajjadiani, John D Kammeyer-Mueller, and Alan Benson.  Their research paper is titled "Who Is Leaving and Why? The Dynamics of High-Quality Human Capital Outflows." The scholars studied more than 1 million employee records from a two-year period at a major retailer with more than 1,600 stores.  

The scholars found that layoffs can trigger a loss of highly talented individuals.  They found that the attrition rate of high-performing employees increases after layoffs of underperforming peers. Ward writes:

Why? High-performing employees typically have more employment options, says Sima Sajjadiani, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s UBC Sauder School of Business and one of the paper’s co-authors. As a result, when layoffs are announced, these individuals might pre-emptively begin job searches to secure new roles rather than wait to see if they would be included in the layoff.

What about when an employee is dismissed for cause?  Interestingly, they again found a disparity in subsequent attrition rates.  Higher performing employees tended to stay, but low performers left in larger numbers after a peer was dismissed for cause.  Sajjadiani explains:

“High-performing employees may view the dismissal of a low-performing colleague as the organization maintaining standards, which can be seen as a positive sign about the organization’s commitment to performance,” Sajjadiani says. “On the other hand, low-performing employees might perceive the dismissal of a similar peer as a warning sign that they might be next, leading to an increase in voluntary turnover among this group.”

Finally, what about voluntary departures?   Well, high performers follow fellow high performers who leave.  Low performers follow fellow low performers.  However, high performers do not leave in greater numbers when low performers depart.  Instead, stars are more likely to stay.  Apparently, our judgements about our performance relative to peers matter a great deal when we decide whether to leave a job.  

Does Your Organization Have Good Mechanisms for Upward Feedback?

Source: picpedia

TINYpulse has published a good blog post about employee retention.  While the conclusions are not at all surprising, they are worth reviewing.  As the economy recovers, retaining top talent will be a substantial challenge for many firms.  Here's one key item from the blog post: 

Employees won’t stay if there isn't a culture of encouraging upward feedback

Employees that don’t feel comfortable giving upward feedback are 16% less likely to stay at their companies, according to TINYpulse. Feedback shouldn’t just flow one way. Open communication is key to understanding the needs and points of improvement for both managers and employees.

Qualtrics reports that 60% of U.S. employees reported having a way to provide feedback about their own employee experience. But only 30% said their feedback is acted upon by their employer.

It’s great when employees have upward evaluation systems in place. But when they believe their leadership can’t or won’t do anything to improve a problem, they may consider their employers to be ineffective.

Encourage employees to regularly communicate their thoughts. An open line of communication will demonstrate to employees that their opinions are important. Regular and honest communication shows employees that they’re valued, and it also allows you, as a leader, to recognize when adjustments might need to be made to improve employee retention.

The Benefits of Losing a Star Employee (Temporarily)

We often convince ourselves that star employees are indispensable.  We worry about losing them, even for a short time.  At some firms, managers restrict the ability of star employees to attend professional development opportunities, because they fear letting them leave even for a week.  Or, they resist attempts to rotate high potentials to other units, even though such lateral transfers might be very beneficial for the individual's development and for the organization's long term effectiveness. Such attitudes about star employees merit examination. Are stars actaully so indispensable? Might losing them, perhaps for a short time, actually be beneficial for a team? John Chen and Pranav Garg examine these issues in a fascinating new paper titled, "Dancing with the stars: Benefits of a star employee’s temporary absence for organizational performance" - published in Strategic Management Journal.  

The scholars obtained statistical data on individual and team performance in the National Basketball Association from 1991-2015.  They examined how teams performed when a player was lost due to injury for a period of time.  Not surprisingly, the researchers find that team performance declines when a star player is absent due to injury.  However, they find that team performance rebounds to a level higher than pre-injury when the star player returns to the basketball court.  The scholars argue that performance increases because team members develop new knowledge and find new ways of working together in the star's absence.  The improved routines and teamwork lead to higher performance when the star returns.   Moreover, the star's absence provides opportunities for other team members to display and enhance their skills.  

Should you send your star employee to that leadership development program or other professoinal development opportunity? Yes. The authors argue that it's a win-win scenario, benefiting the individual employee and the team overall. Here is an excerpt from their paper:

Sending a star for a training program may be a win-win scenario. While the star is away, the firm can discover new routines and provide opportunities to non-stars that might actually improve the firm’s overall prospects on critical projects. At the same time, training programs can help the star develop team building or leadership skills that contribute to the firm’s longer-term roadmap upon her return... Our study underscores the idea that disruption may foster learning. In doing so, we echo recent thinking that an organization “periodically needs to shake itself up, regardless of the competitive landscape” (Vermeulen, Puranam, and Gulati, 2010: 71) and search for new routines, even when it is performing well.

Should You Hire for Cultural Fit or Not?

For decades, executives have stressed the importance of hiring for cultural fit.  You often hear discussions about cultural fit among people on recruitment and selection committees, as well as by people working for executive search firms.   Recently, though, Adam Grant of the Wharton School has made an important point about the downside of hiring for cultural fit, and he's received a great deal of attention for his thought-provoking and insightful comments.  Here's what Grant has said, as reported in an interview with Dan Schawbel for Fortune. 

First, stop hiring on cultural fit. That’s a great way to breed groupthink. Emphasizing cultural fit leads you to bring in a bunch of people who think in similar ways to your existing employees. There’s evidence that once a company goes public, those that hire on cultural fit actually grow more slowly because they struggle to innovate and change. It’s wiser to follow the example from the design firm IDEO, and hire on cultural contribution. Instead of looking for people who fit the culture, ask what’s missing from your culture, and select people who can bring that to the table.

Is he right?  I htink he makes a strong argument for avoiding groupthink.  Managers do have a very unfortunate tendency to hire people who look, think, and act much as they do.  To be effective, leaders need to consider hiring people who think differently, who complement and augment their own skills and abilities (rather than replicating the expertise and modes of thinking already on the team).   

Having said that, I think there are some important aspects of "fit" that need to be considered when hiring.  Otherwise, new employees will either face organ rejection at their new firms, or they will have an adverse impact on the organization's effectiveness.  First and foremost, it's very important to make sure that a new hire shares the same values as the organization he or she will be joining.  Second, does the new hire believe in the mission of the enterprise?  Do they feel passionately about the organization's purpose?   They may have different views about the means to achieve those objectives.  That's healthy.   Finally, will the person's leadership approach enable others to succeed?  Hopefully, the hiring organization has leaders in place who have created a safe place where others can speak up, discuss mistakes, express dissent, and ask challenging questions.   New hires have to be able to create a safe climate for their employees as well.  If they a history of acting in ways that discourage others from speaking up, then they won't "fit" and they will have an adverse impact on the organization's effectiveness.  

Rethinking the Job Interview

Professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote a terrific Fast Company column recently titled, "What If We Killed The Job Interview?"  He summarizes the argument against relying so heavily on interviews to evaluate job candidates: 

  

The most comprehensive scientific study to date on the predictive power of different recruitment tools suggests that the typical job interview provides very little valuable information over and above psychometric tests, which tend to be both quicker and cheaper to administer.

For example, once you know a candidate’s score on a test of general learning ability, a typical job interview will only improve your ability to predict their performance in a given role by 4%, the analysis found. Interviews are more useful when they’re totally structured and standardized, to the point of resembling a multiple-choice questionnaire; this can increase their accuracy by up to 13%. Yet very few real-world interviews follow a rigorous format. Interviewers usually prefer to go with the flow, stubbornly relying on their own intuition.

Most of the attributes interviewers try to evaluate by gut feel–a candidate’s competencies, skills, personality, values, “culture fit,” and so on–are more rigorously inferred from other data like resumes, simulations, tests, and past performance ratings. Interviews certainly create opportunities for candidates to make claims about these qualities, but as I argue in my latest book, there’s little reason to believe them. Indeed, there’s not much overlap between the talents people saythey have and the ones they actually possess. (Plus, interviewers often use the idea of “good culture fit” to justify hiring people from their own in-groups.)

As Chamorro-Premuzic points out, though, many business professionals can't let go of the interview as a principal tool for evaluating job candidates.  Why?  People THINK that they are awesome talent evaluators, and that they can conduct an interview much more effectively than most others can.  Our supreme self-confidence clouds our judgment about the validity of interviewing.  If we kill the interview, though, how can we judge talent?  We have to find other ways for people to demonstrate what they have actually accomplished, rather than simply asking them to describe their skills and capabilities.  We have to see them in action, rather than letting them simply talk about themselves.  It's time to rethink the hiring process from start to finish.  

Hiring Lessons from the NFL Draft

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Last night, the 2018 National Football League Draft began.  During this annual event, each team selects the most talented college football players to add to its roster for the coming year. Unfortunately, picking players is incredibly challenging.   Are some teams consistently better than others at selecting players?  Wharton Professor Cade Massey has studied the draft for years, and he finds that talent selection is much like beating the market with regard to financial investing - i.e. it is very difficult to do. He concludes, "Some teams have great years, other teams have bad years - and it matters. But those differences aren't persistent year-to-year, which tells me that they are chance driven. Something between 95 and 100 percent - I'm not exaggerating - of team differences in the draft is driven by chance."

What can companies learn about talent selection from the NFL draft? Massey offers a very useful recommenation about enhancing the quality of the draft selection process. His advice has important implications for the hiring process in any company:

NFL teams have dozens of scouts and a complicated method of getting multiple looks at their prospects. Even marginal prospects are seen by more than one scout, and the top guys might be evaluated by a dozen different people. In some teams a scout will know the previous scouts’ opinions before forming his or her own while other teams keep scouts blind to previous evaluations. This is a key difference.

People are impressionable. When they are exposed to other’s opinions before forming their own, they tend to anchor on the existing view. More generally, the “wisdom of the crowd” depends on the independence of the respective opinions within the crowd. Yet that independence is easily compromised, in many ways—anchoring, of course, but also common backgrounds, training, friends, etc. You may think you’re getting 5-6 opinions when effectively you’re getting only 1.5! 

A good hiring process explicitly pushes against these compromising factors: Don’t let people talk to each other or see other’s opinions before providing their own, expose the candidate to judges in different ways and at different points in time, and bring people with different perspectives into the process. More independence is often the biggest improvement an organization can easily make in their hiring process.

Consider your own hiring practices in your organization?  Have you created and maintained independence during the evaluation by multiple interviewers?  If not, you might consider "keeping your judges apart" as Massey suggests.  

Attracting Talent: What is Your Employer Brand Strategy?

Matt Handford, the SVP of People for Hootsuite, has written a good article for HR Morning about how to attract and retain talented employees in a tight labor market.  He focuses on your "employer brand" strategy.   Handford explains: 

It should go without saying that in order to develop a strategic and effective brand persona, there needs to be a plan behind it. First off, it’s critical to understand that a brand is not the perks or salary associated with working at your company. While perks like dog-friendly offices, free beer, extra vacation and ping pong are elements of creating a positive workplace it does not, and should not, define you as a brand.

Take a critical look at your current brand and define what you want to be known for; when a potential employee thinks of your company, what is the ideal perception you want to create? By thinking from that perspective, you can work backwards and develop steps to increase your brand’s strategic positioning until you are attracting the type of talent that aligns with your vision. Ultimately you want to capitalize on what makes your brand unique, and build from there.

Handford is right on the money.  The key question is:  How do you build such an effective employer brand strategy?   I would argue that it begins with an in-depth examination of your current competitive position in the labor market.  Clearly, you need to speak with your employees.  What does the brand mean to them?  More importantly, however, you must spend time with two other groups of people:  those who you hope to recruit (perhaps college students, for instance), and those who have rejected you.  The latter group is especially important.  You need to speak with those who have either connected with your firm in some way, but ultimately did not choose employment with your company, or those who have chosen not to engage with you at all.   What's driving them away?  Answering that fundamental question is the first step in building an effective employer brand strategy.  

Is It a Curse to Be Labeled a Star?

Jennifer and Gianpiero Petriglieri have written a terrific Harvard Business Review article titled, "The Talent Curse."   In this essay, they argue that being labeled as a "high potential" or "future leader" can be detrimental to many talented employees.   The label changes their behavior and mindset, and as a result, their stress level increases, performance suffers, and attitude toward the organization sours.  They explain:

In an age when companies wage wars for talent, it is hard to acknowledge that for some people, being recognized as talented turns out to be a curse. But it does. Aspiring leaders work hard to live up to others’ expectations, and so the qualities that made them special to begin with—those that helped them excel and feel engaged—tend to get buried. They behave more like everyone else, which saps their energy and ambition. They may start simply going through the motions at work—or, like Thomas, look for an escape hatch. This curse strikes the talented even in companies that invest heavily in their development—places where executives are sincerely dedicated to helping people thrive.

What are the signs that being labeled as a star may actually be a curse for you?  They cite three symptoms of trouble. First, are you determined to prove that you are worthy of your label as a star, rather than focused on simply using your talents effectively to achieve personal and organizational goals?  Do you stress short term performance at the expense of continuing to learn and grow?  Second, have you become very focused on your image?  Do you want to be your authentic self, but find yourself trying to be someone else?  Third, are you going through the motions now, with aspirations of eventually doing meaningful work down the road?  Have you convinced yourself that it's okay that you aren't passionate about your work at this point, because you will have a chance to find passion and purpose in the future?  

In sum, you have to ask the question: Has the star, high potential, or future leader label fundamentally changed my behavior?  If so, you have to take a hard look at your mindset, attitude, and behavior.  

Identifying High Potentials in Your Organization

Many organizations seek to identify their high potential employees.  They provide them good opportunities for growth and development and interesting work assignments.  Firms typically invest a great deal in their high potential employees.  A recent article in Harvard Business Review suggests that many firms may be going about this process all wrong.  They might not be selecting the right people as their high potential employees.  

Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, leaders of the Zenger/Folkman leadership development consulting firm, wrote recently about a study they conducted at three companies.  They studied nearly 2,000 high potential employees at these firms.   Zenger and Folkman used a 360 degree feedback instrument to evaluate the leadership effectiveness of these individuals.  Amazingly, they found that 42% of these high potentials scored below average on leadership effectiveness.  12% of the high potentials ranked in the bottom quartile.  

What's going on?  Zenger and Folkman argue that companies are selecting high potentials using the wrong criteria in many cases.   They maintain that many firms select based on technical and professional expertise.  Moreover, they examine whether people can deliver results, meet commitments, and fit the organizational culture.  Unfortunately, many of these traits might make someone a strong individual performer, but not an effective team leader.  

Specialists vs. Generalists: How Do They Fare in the Labor Market?

Tulane Professor Jennifer Merluzzi and Columbia Professor Damon Phillips have conducted some interesting new research on the labor market for graduates from top MBA programs.   They studied approximately 400 graduates of top business schools in the United States.   These graduates too jobs in the investment banking industry.   They discovered that students with broader and more diverse backgrounds and experiences received more job offers and secured higher signing bonuses than those individuals with prior specialization in investment banking/finance both at work and in school.   Here's how the scholars explain their findings:

First, in labor markets with strong institutional screening mechanisms, specialization won’t be as valuable. In the absence of other information, it’s an important indicator of skill, but graduation from a top MBA program is a strong signal to the market that someone is qualified. In that scenario demonstrating consistency is no longer advantageous. Second, employers may discount experiences that incrementally extend previous efforts. Among MBAs, there’s now a strong emphasis on building a consistent profile as a finance person or a marketing person. You end up with many similar people in the market. Specialization becomes commodified, giving you less bargaining power, because you’re easily substitutable. Plus, when the firm is used to hiring a lot of people like you, it’s easier to calculate your value compared with someone with diverse accomplishments.

Clearly, some jobs require specialists.  We cannot generalize these findings to all circumstances in the labor market.  However, the research does remind us that the trend toward specialization in education  and training may be counterproductive in some ways.  I don't think that the findings suggest that we should ignore the development of specialized skills though.  We need to educate students with breadth and depth.  I don't think it's either an either/or proposition.    We need students to have distinctive skills that employers value and that can enable them to hit the ground running when they enter the workforce.  However, we want them to have a broad background that enables them to make connections among ideas in various domains, and that enables them to put their work in context.  We also need them to be able to work with others who have different skills, backgrounds, and experiences.   

At Bryant University, we require our undergraduate business students to complete an extensive general education curriculum, AND we require them to minor in a liberal arts and/or sciences area.  Thus, our finance graduates come out with minors in areas such as history, political science, or psychology.  We believe that this combination makes them highly valuable as they enter the labor force, and our placement statistics confirm the validity of those beliefs.  

Can a Team Have Too Much Talent?

Internal Promotions vs. Switching Companies

Wharton Professors Matthew Bidwell and Ethan Mollick have conducted research on external vs. internal mobility of employees during their careers.   Here's what they have found (excerpt from interview with Professor Bidwell by Knowledge@Wharton):  

We found quite big differences between the moves that took place inside the firms, and the moves that took place across the firms. When people are moving inside firms, we saw that they got a pay raise. They also got quite a big increase in responsibility — they tended to rise up, in terms of their title. And they pretty much doubled the number of people that they were managing.

When people moved jobs across firms, they also got a pay raise, but it didn’t tend to come with an increase in responsibilities. Instead, they were moving to a job with often a similar title, and usually with the same number of subordinates — managing the same number of people. And so they weren’t necessarily getting a promotion in the same way.

This speaks to the different reasons for moving. When people are moving inside [the firm], they’re moving up the ladder. When people are moving to jobs in other firms, they’re getting a pay raise. They get paid to move. But they’re not making the same kind of move up the ladder. They’re moving to a similar rung, albeit in a different organization.

The authors offer several cautionary notes for firms and employees alike.  For companies, beware that you are often going to have to pay a premium when relying on external talent to fill key positions.   You pay that premium even though you often are not providing that person with additional responsibilities relative to what they had at their previous firm.   For employees, beware that hopping from one firm to another may get you an immediate pay raise, but it may delay future promotions and pay increases, costing you money down the road.   The authors do not suggest that one should stay at the same firm forever.  However, they do caution against taking a job at a firm where career advancement seems unlikely.   Being able to land a few promotions before moving to another company can be the better long term strategy for career advancement, development, and compensation. 

The (Not-So) Hidden Value of Pixar's Short Films

The Wall Street Journal reports this week on Pixar's purpose in making short films.  For instance, Lava is the short film that runs before the newest Pixar feature film, Inside Out.    The short films are a wonderful opportunity for experimentation.   As a result, they help fuel the creative process at the highly successful film studio.  Here's one excerpt from the article:  

[Making short films] is a wonderful opportunity to step out and do something you may not be able to do on a feature, really take some chances,” said Mr. Murphy, a senior animator at the studio. “I think each short really represents the tastes of the individual that directed them.” 

The article highlights one additional value from making these short films.   It enables Pixar to develop and evaluate its talent.  Providing young directors and animators an opportunity to create a short film is a relatively inexpensive way to see who might be ready to work on a feature film.  Moreover, it enables Pixar to grow and develop those high potentials.   They learn by doing in an environment in which they can take some risks.  Every firm should be looking for opportunities to experiment as a means of fostering innovation, but they should also be examining how these experiments can be a useful means of nurturing and testing younger talent. 

Does Potential Matter More Than Achievement?

Research by scholars Zakary Tormala, Jayson Jia, and Michael Norton has examined how people perceive those with high promise/potential.   Tormala explained their findings in an article on "Insights by Stanford Business."  

In a series of experiments set in different contexts, we found that high potential can be more appealing than equally high achievement. Our studies uncovered this in situations ranging from basketball player evaluations to hiring decisions, to salary offers, to grad school admissions recommendations... In general, potential seems to engender greater interest than achievement. It was counterintuitive to us too at first. It seems objectively more impressive to actually achieve something great than to have mere potential to do so. But there is a fairly robust finding in the psychological literature that uncertain events and outcomes can stimulate greater interest and information processing — more thought — than more certain ones. So when potential is being compared with achievement, the uncertainty surrounding potential can make it more engaging, or maybe even pleasurable, to think about. It's as if people engage more as they try to work through the uncertainty and figure out what the truth will be... In most of our studies we tried to equate the level of potential and achievement. For example, in one study we showed the exact same (impressive) stats for a hypothetical NBA basketball player and merely described those stats as predictions or as actual performance records. We found that participants thought the player was more likely to end up an All-Star one day when they'd seen predicted rather than actual stats.

The authors argue that these findings have substantial implications with regard to talent management decisions. I strongly agree.  They also contend that small changes in wording can matter a great deal, perhaps in a recommendation letter that you provide for someone.  Talking about their potential can be even more impactful than rattling off their past achievements.  

Don't Pay for Past Performance!

This week marks the beginning of another major league baseball season.   Hope springs eternal.  In my home state, fans believe that our beloved Boston Red Sox will engineer another  magical "last to first" season, much like the 2013 campaign.  In Chicago, fans of the downtrodden Cubs believe that this season might just be the year that they return to respectability.  Of course, most teams have welcomed some new players in the offseason, including some high-priced free agents.  In addition, they have had to say goodbye to some key players who were signed by other teams.  In Boston, we lost ace pitcher Jon Lester to the Cubs.  Fans were not happy.  Management of the Red Sox claimed that they did not want to commit to a 6 year, $155 million contract to a pitcher in his 30s.  The philosophy is clear: Don't pay for past performance.   Fans don't like to hear that.  We fall in love with players based on past performance, and we aren't worried much about what that player will be like in three years.  Management, though, must think about the future.  Smart baseball teams, as well as other sports teams, do not pay for past performance. 

Business leaders should take a cue from the smart general managers in sports.   Of course, in sports, the reason we don't want to pay for past performance is because skills deteriorate with age.  In business, that is not the case.  In fact, performance can increase as managers gain more experience.  However, we still should be worried about paying strictly based on past performance. Why?  What made a manager and an organization successful in the past may not be the key to future success.  Competitive environments, technology, and consumer preferences can change dramatically.  As a result, the needed employee skill sets change.  Someone may have excelled in the past, but they may not have the skills required to succeed in the future.  They may have mental models that are rooted in the past, and they may have a hard time changing those mindsets.   For these reasons, companies need to think about the future drivers of performance, and not simply pay for talent that has excelled in the past. 

Unconventional Ways to Retain Talented Workers

Chris Ostoich has written an interesting article for Fast Company regarding how to retain talented employees using some rather unconventional approaches.  Ostoich is the founder of a software company named BlackbookHR.   I especially liked this point excerpted below:

Keep An Inventory Of Employees’ Skills And Interests

You may know what your employee Andy does in his job—he’s a front-end web developer and designer—but do you know he’s also a self-taught guitarist, a video editor, a painter, and has a variety of other talents? All employees have skills and interests they don’t use in their day-to-day work. If you can tap into those outside talents, you can benefit your company and better engage your employees. Make a place on your company’s intranet, in a Google doc, or anywhere people can share or search for skills. Look for opportunities to tap into this knowledge network whenever possible.

What is Critical Thinking?

The Wall Street Journal published a terrific article by Melissa Korn this week.   The article focuses on the fact that many executives say that they want to hire people with "critical thinking" skills. However, the definition of that term seems elusive.  In fact, some people don't have a clear definition of the term. Others disagree over the meaning of critical thinking skills.   Perhaps, the article suggests, you simply know them when you see them.   The article does offer a few intriguing definitions of the term:

• “The ability to cross-examine evidence and logical argument. To sift through all the noise.”
  -Richard Arum, New York University sociology professor
• “Thinking about your thinking, while you’re thinking, in order to improve your thinking.”
  -Linda Elder, educational psychologist; president, Foundation for Critical Thinking
• “Do they make use of information that’s available in their journey to arrive at a conclusion or decision? How do they make use of that?”
  -Michael Desmarais, global head of recruiting, Goldman Sachs Group

Attracting and Retaining Better Workers: Higher Wages Alone Won't Do the Trick

We have heard a great deal of commentary about the low wages paid to front-line employees in some industries, particularly the retail and restaurant sectors.   While politicians debate the merits of raising the minimum wage, some people point to the companies paying higher wages as a model.  They argue that these companies attract and retain more productive workers because they pay higher-than-usual wages.   For instance, people point to firms such as Costco, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods as examples.   I think that we have to be very careful about these arguments though.  These firms attract and retain highly productive, engaged employees for reasons well beyond the wages that they pay.  Yes, they pay their employees more than some of their rivals.  However, these firms also have built an entire organizational system that supports an engaged, productive, and collaborative workforce.  They have developed a culture that attracts talented people.  They have embraced certain values and principles.  They have articulated a sense of purpose that people find compelling.  They have developed managers and supervisors who know how to engage employees.   I could go on.  The point is simple: they have built an entire system that attracts and retains these workers, and helps them produce great value for the firm.   Paying someone a few bucks more without doing these other things won't have any significant effect on engagement, customer satisfaction, employee retention, or profits. 

How PWC Engages Millennials

Bob Moritz, the U.S. Chairman of PWC, has written an article for Harvard Business Review regarding his firm's efforts to attract, engage, and retain millennials.  Moritz and his firm collaborated with researchers from USC and LBS to understand key generational differences.  From that work, PWC began to develop initiatives to foster higher levels of engagement and retention among millennials.  They have tracked the effectiveness of various efforts.  Moritz cites four major areas of emphasis:

1. Give them voice. Millennials want to have input regarding the future direction of the organization.  Therefore, PWC gave them voice in several powerful ways.  They asked millennials to offer ideas regarding the most effective methods for talent development in the firm.  In addition, they asked people for suggestions regarding the next $100 million opportunity for PWC.  More than 70% of the employees offered suggestions.  
2. Provide flexible career paths.   Millennials do not want to stay in the same role for a lengthy period of time.  They want to shift positions and roles, try new things, and embrace different opportunities.  Moreover, they want greater flexibility in their careers.  PWC has created several programs that enable talented employees to take time off or to work part-time for the firm while pursuing other opportunities (such as graduate school). 
3. Recognize them often and in multiple ways.  Millennials want to be recognized, and that does not mean only monetary awards.  PWC implemented more frequent recognition, and they began to offer a host of non-monetary rewards.   For instance, PWC created a sabbatical program as a reward for millennials who perform well and stay at the firm for a certain period of time.
4. Give them a chance to give back.  Millennials want to make a broader impact, and they want to work for a firm that has that same aspiration.  PWC found that employees who participate in a corporate responsibility initiative tend to stay at the firm for a longer period of time.  For example, participants in one program to enhance students' financial literacy tended to exhibit much less turnover than those who did not participate (only 8% of participants had left PWC a year later, while 16% of non-participants had left the firm).