Diagnosis | Bovo-Tighe

19
May

Time to Rehire Yourself?

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Remember that feeling? Recapture it!

While we were researching a recent blog post about the marketing company HubSpot and its intensive focus on developing a highly productive corporate culture, one of us came across a related post on LinkedIn by the CTO of HubSpot, Darmesh Shah, which deserved a little attention of its own:

Ten Ways to be Sensationally Successful at Your New Job

This is very compelling, because everyone starts a new job with a head of steam, full of energy and ready to contribute at a high level. Most people quickly lose that head of steam, and end up cruising along with the pack, as Shah says “where every day feels the same and your new job quickly seems just like the old job.”

How do you avoid that sub-optimizing trap? It’s all up to you.

We will summarize Mr. Shah’s points and add our own take, as we always do!

NOTE: If you are a seasoned employee, you can benefit from these ideas, too. Simply embed the mindset that you have just been hired, and think about how your job and your work environment look to a new hire. What would you see? What action would you take to improve things? Think about the following advice with that in mind:

1. Pretend you are still interviewing for the job for the first six months. Work hard to prove that your skill set and leadership are worth keeping and developing.

2. Start a project that leverages your experience to solve issues in your new organization. Involve peers in the work, especially those who may benefit from the result.

3. Embed the mindset that you are “here to help.” That means helping everyone:

Work on your boss’ challenges without waiting for a direct invitation.
Volunteer to join a work team with a big project that is struggling.
Seek help from others, then offer help to those same people immediately thereafter.

4. Take action without prompting. Seek areas that could benefit from new thinking, and focus your personal projects on those areas of opportunity.

As Shah says:

“You don’t have to wait to be asked. You don’t have to wait to be assigned. Pick a side project where, if you fail, there’s no harm and no foul, and take your shot. You never know how it will turn out… and what it will do for your career.”

Some of you would say that this is not ground-breaking stuff, yet too many employees fall into a cruising rhythm and lose that “head of steam.” So covering this topic seems like it still has a great deal of utility. In fact, we talk about it regularly.

When you get to work tomorrow, rehire yourself and assess your situation as a new employee would, especially one with a skill set like yours. What project would you start first?

Let us know what you figure out!

14
May

HubSpot and Netflix Offer Insights on Building Productive Organizational Cultures

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We find useful information about talent management and corporate culture in all sorts of places. Just this week our marketing guy got an e-mail from a marketing company he follows called HubSpot. It surprised him with this headline:

“Advice on Corporate Culture From Netflix’s Former Chief Talent Officer”

Wait. What? Why is a marketing company like HubSpot sharing thoughts on corporate culture?

The answer is simple, and informative: HubSpot takes its culture very seriously, and feels that all their clients (small companies for the most part) could benefit from the productivity gained by building their own consistent, transparent organizational culture. Continue reading →

25
Apr

Are Millennials Really Different About Job-Hopping?

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The last few years has seen a mini-boom in HR training products and services to help them “understand” the Millennial generation that is now entering the workforce. This recent article in Forbes by Contributor Jeanne Meister is typical, with its headline “Job Hopping Is the ‘New Normal’ for Millennials: Three Ways to Prevent a Human Resource Nightmare.” Yikes!

Reality Check: Millennials at 22 act a lot like Baby Boomers at 22.

Boomers liked pogo sticks, too!

As we begin to experience the reality of their workforce participation, rather than the forecast, we are beginning to see evidence that these young people are not so different from past generations after all, especially Baby Boomers.

Consider these descriptions:

Baby Boomers charged out of college with a real ideological head of steam, ready to challenge authority and upset the status quo. The Vietnam experience had convinced them that the older generation did not necessarily “know best,” and were willing to question decisions and demand a rationale, as their parents did not. Continue reading →

15
Apr

Raise the Meaning Quotient for Employees to Raise Productivity

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We have been writing over the last week about the top leadership skill articles read in the First Quarter of 2013 in the McKinsey Quarterly, the online newsletter of management consultancy McKinsey. We are always struck by how many of these articles are focused on people skills and leadership. Clearly these issues remain perennial challenges for senior executives (and leaders at all levels).

In this post, we explore the fifth most popular article: Increasing the Meaning Quotient of Work. (Free registration may be required to read the full article.)

Our first response to this article was “What the heck is a “meaning quotient?” Next, we thought “Here we go again with extra buzzwords that repackage old knowledge.” But, just as the readers who put this article in the top ten found it worth reading, we also found something useful here.

Employee Engagement Demands Meaningful Work

The authors of this article, Susie Cranston and Scott Keller, have spent a lot of time researching work environments “that inspire exceptional levels of energy, increase self-confidence, and boost individual productivity.” Continue reading →

11
Apr

Employees Can Only Manage Their Time if the Organization Lets Them

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This is the second in a series of posts about the most read articles in the McKinsey Quarterly, the management consultancy’s free online business magazine. (Free registration is required to view the articles.)

OK, now fit two more projects into this day.
image source: mftrou.com

This article, ranked second on the most-read list, takes a new angle at the eternal Time Management issue by pinning the blame not just on the individual, but on the organization. We work with clients constantly on individual time management skills, but we do see the authors’ point: Employees can operate at the peak of time efficiency, and still not always successfully manage the endless number of projects that keep piling up.

The Organization Assumption: Every Employee’s Time is Limitless Continue reading →

5
Apr

Goal Alignment Takes Work and Communication that Counts

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A recent Aberdeen Group study on human capital management trends found firms with HR departments that are aligned with business goals are able to better plan for future talent needs and integrate workforce and talent initiatives. If Aberdeen is going to call out what should be an obvious business success factor, they must have found that insuring business goal alignment is a competitive advantage that only some organizations achieve. In other words, most organizations are not managing to achieve goal alignment between senior executives and HR executives.

Here’s a common mistake: These arrows must point in BOTH directions. Information and recommendations flowing up underpin goals flowing down.
image source: www.peoplestreme.com

How can HR’s goals get out of alignment with organizational goals, if departmental goals are founded on strategic goals that come from “the top?” In fact, given that the Human Resource function is designed to support organizational goals through the sourcing and retention of talent, it should strike all of us as obvious that aligning HR goals to organizational goals would be a priority. Jack Welch, during his successful tenure as head of General Electric, famously had his top HR executive deeply involved in strategic matters to achieve that alignment.

How can such a clear connection be missed by so many organizations?

The most common way that HR goals drift away from strategic goals is when the developers of the strategic goals do not clearly and transparently communicate those goals (and their rationale) to the people running HR. Without clear and regular communication (Communication that Counts, in our Foundations of Excellence philosophy), a department head has to create their own goals in a vacuum.

Of course, great communication is a two-way street: HR leaders must actively seek this information, asking not only to understand the motivations behind the goals, but also for a chance to participate in their development.

How can HR best contribute actively to goal-setting? Here are a few ideas to consider:

Provide data to help senior executives understand the gaps that may exist between the human resources available, and those needed to achieve particular goals.
Work with other departments to help them provide productivity data to support strategic planning.
Gather data on the relative benefits of training and development targeted at retention, and the costs of higher turnover on productivity.

HR Daily Advisor provides a list of starting points for collecting HR metrics for C-suite impact. We think the training and development section should also include detailed tracking of individual productivity improvements during and after training initiatives, with dollars assigned to each item as either savings or new revenue.

At the end of every financial quarter or year, HR should be able to report how its activities supported organizational goals by improving skills, productivity, retention and cost-containment (for benefits, say.) Senior executives will appreciate the insight into how best to align human assets with organizational goals, and how the work HR does raises employee engagement and, therefore, productivity.

3
Apr

Our Philosophy about the Pursuit of Truth Includes Your Health

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Good Morning America Clip on Job-Related Health Issues

Business cultures around the world vary greatly between countries, and between organizations. One common trait among highly successful executives, however, is that they skew their work/life balance heavily toward work. They pour 10-12 hours each day into work, work on weekends, and think about work when they are supposed to be decompressing and “working” on their family relationships and friendships.

In our own work with clients, we stress a rebalancing of the work/life balance back toward life. This is not because we think family and friends are more important than your job (that is your decision to make), but because the truth is that a better balance actually makes you more effective at what you do as a leader.

As part of the Pursuit of Truth facet of our Foundations of Excellence leadership philosophy, you must be frank about how you are leading yourself! Part of leading yourself more effectively is listening to your body and responding to its signals. This LinkedIn post by Vivek Wadhwa, a serial entrepreneur who literally almost worked himself to death, drives this point home for us.

Why can’t hard-driving people stop and take a breath occasionally and recharge their batteries?

They fear the competition. (If someone is working harder than you, they might surpass you!)
They have a lot to do, and must get it all done.
They love to work, and struggle with personal time.
They struggle to delegate. (The idea that someone may be working an important part of your project without close supervision makes you nervous.)

We work with clients to help them work smarter:

They realize that true personal time gains you energy that makes working hours more productive.
We also try to instill greater trust in subordinates, most of whom are quite talented and just waiting to get a chance to perform independently.
Finally, time away spurs creativity. Again and again we see the people who take time off come back and solve perplexing issues more quickly and creatively because their mind had a chance to take a break, think in fresh directions, and reorder data more clearly.

It takes a while to instill this more productive leadership mindset into hard working managers and executives, but the proof is in the results: More and better work getting done in less time.

Have you had a unexpected event (positive ones included) that made you realize you had to reset your work/life balance. Let us know what the result was.

25
Mar

Three Key Drivers of Employee Engagement

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Three employee engagement drivers second nature for all leaders.

Make our three engagement drivers second nature and you will win a lot of competitions!

Countless studies support the proposition that stronger employee engagement raises productivity. Yet, organizations still struggle with it:

29% of employees declare themselves engaged, according to this year’s annual Gallup survey.
The other 71% are either disengaged or, worse, completely unengaged.

We know why: Employee engagement can only be sustained over time in an organization that adopts a ‘mindset of engagement’ and makes all the drivers of engagement second nature for every leader at every level. There are multiple drivers. We touched on just nine of them in this month’s newsletter.

We can condense the message down from nine to three: Here are the overriding personal and corporate mindsets that we focus on when building an engaged workforce:

A reverence for the truth –Real information can be shared up and down the chain of command without assigning blame or retribution. Pressing through assumptions to facts should be valued. Bad behavior should be addressed as a teaching moment, with curative rather than punitive responses.

Clarity of communication – Share goals, aspirations, challenges and hurdles. Ask for input. Value the input. Act on the input. Give credit to the source for good input.

Building a high level of trust – Fulfill promises. “Tuesday is Tuesday,” not Wednesday or Friday. Never throw anyone “under a bus,” aside from yourself. Accept full personal accountability for past results, and be a leader in solving problems. Ask not “why did this happen?” Ask “What can I do to fix it?”

There is no quick fix for a lack of engagement. Your organization earns it from each employee through the actions of its leaders over time. It is far easier to lose engagement (especially the underpinning trust) than it is to earn it, so you can never take a day off! That is why it must be a mindset rather than a program.

What do you think of our three key drivers, or our nine more tactical areas of focus? Let us know!

4
Mar

Leadership Tales from Top People – Courtesy of LinkedIn

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We recently found a list on LinkedIn of short advice columns written by successful people. A lot of what they wrote echoed what we teach everyone we support in our work:

Working with PEOPLE is the center of everyone’s success formula.
Keep your own energy forward-focused and action-oriented.

These are not mutually exclusive, either: One feeds off of the other. Let’s explore three of the advice columns at random to see how these two themes pop up.

Richard Branson:

“The amount of time people spend looking back on failed projects has always astounded me. If we were to add up all of the hours spent regretting mistakes and use that time to develop new ideas, who knows how many brilliant new businesses would be created.”

At Bovo-Tighe, we like to say your time is limited, but the energy you pack into that time is unlimited. Richard offers a great caveat to that: How do you use all the energy you pour into your time? Are you forward-focused and action-oriented? Or do you actively dwell on “what might have been?” Continue reading →

4
Jan

Happy New Year! What a Great Year 2013 Will Be.

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We wish you all the best as we step into this new year. As all fresh starts are, this one is full of promise and energy. Take a moment to adopt the mindset that this is your first day on a new job:

Go out and meet your coworkers all over again, just as you did when you started.
Put aside “experience” and give a profound, dispassionate review to your priorities for the new year. What chronic issues truly needs a fresh approach? Discuss these challenges with all the people you are meeting all over again!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!