Issuu

JULY 2022 • Vol. 39 • No. 07 (ISSN 2562-0711)

THE KEYS TO HUMANCENTRIC LEADERSHIP - Ron Price,

President, TTI Success Insights

Themed Edition on

Human-Centric Leadership

Human-Centric Leaders Are Psychologically Safe Leaders

Leadership Is About People First

Howatt HR

Oshkosh Corporation

- Bill Howatt,

- Emma McTague,

What Does Human-Centered Leadership Mean In An Uncertain World? - Désirée Pascual, Headspace Health

Technology Needs People Too - Ganesh Jayaram, John Deere

INDEX

Leadership Excellence JULY 2022

Vol.39 No.07 (ISSN 2562-0711)

The Keys To HumanCentric Leadership

Themed Edition on

Human-Centric Leadership

Being a human-centric leader is more important today than ever before - Ron Price,

On the Cover Articles

President, TTI Success Insights

Sponsored

10 Cracking the Engagement Code - Dan Rust, Vice President–Leadership &

OD Practice, Infopro Learning

22 The Characteristics Of Mentally Fit Leaders How do we find this type of leaders? - Jody Michael, CEO, Jody Michael Associates

29 Storytelling: How To Activate Strategies And Inspire Your People

Are you ready to make storytelling a priority? - Rich Berens, CEO, President and Chief Client Fanatic, Root, Inc

37 Empathetic Leadership, The Need Of The Hour

Has mid-level management been given the right tools to handle the empathy that the job requires? - Janine Allen, President, Kaiser & Partners

39 A Blueprint For Culture In Today’s Changing World

Why culture matters, what culture means, and how to create or change a culture - Dave Ulrich, Rensis Likert Professor, Ross School of Business and

Co-Founder & Principal, RBL Group

44 6 Things Every CEO Should Know About Branding

Managing the human side of the business - Jane Cavalier, CEO and Founder, BrightMark Consulting

Building A Winning Team: A Great Team Needs a Great Coach HR.com Professional Education Team

Top Picks

INDEX

Human-Centric Leaders Are Psychologically Safe Leaders How to become a human-centric leader - Bill Howatt, Founder, Howatt HR

Leadership Is About People First How people-first organizations make people better - Emma McTague,

Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, Oshkosh Corporation

What Does Human-Centered Leadership Mean In An Uncertain World? Our best ideas often emerge from unexpected places - Désirée Pascual, Chief People Officer,

Headspace Health

Technology Needs People Too Implementing sustainable leadership models in IT for long-term success - Ganesh Jayaram,

Chief Information Officer, John Deere

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Publisher, HR.com

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Human-Centered Leaders are the Future of Leadership The Covid-19 pandemic and the following crisis have shed light on a key business trend - human-centric leadership. It’s time for forward-thinking organizations to realize the power of putting people first and treating them well. But are leaders keeping up?

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In today’s uncertain and evolving world of work, ‘human-centered’ takes a whole new meaning. Making it work now requires a change in how leadership acts - by staying connected with their people’s needs, focusing on their engagement, belonging, and what they require for success.

safe leaders, Howatt HR's Bill Howatt identifies daily practices for becoming a human-centric leader in his article, Human-Centric Leaders Are Psychologically Safe Leaders. While this pandemic has caused hardship for many, it has provided an opportunity for more leaders to find their humanity. Oshkosh Corporation's Emma McTague in her article, Leadership Is About People First, highlights how people-first organizations make people better.

Employees prioritize a culture where they feel valued, included, and cared for. And all these begin with human-centric leadership.

Even in the realm of information technology, human-centric leadership plays a vital role as businesses evolve, according to Ganesh Jayaram (John Deere) in his article, Technology Needs People Too.

In the July issue of Leadership Excellence, we have included a few articles focusing on why being a human-centric leader is more important today than ever before.

In brief, for organizations to thrive today, the focus should be on humanity and strategies that are human-centric. Human-centered leaders are the future of leadership.

Human-centric leadership is important, but what are the tools and skills you need to be a human-centric leader? TTI Success Insights' Ron Price in his article, The Keys To Human-Centric Leadership, talks about how you can be the leader your people need in today’s rapidly changing workplace.

We hope you enjoy reading all the articles and find some helpful tips and takeaways from this issue of Leadership Excellence.

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COVER ARTICLE

The Keys To Human-Centric Leadership Being a human-centric leader is more important today than ever before By Ron Price, TTI Success Insights

he nature of how people work, how organizations function, and how leaders lead has dramatically changed in recent years. People now are exposed to so much of the world and so much information constantly, they have endless choices in the way that they live and work. Employees are far more self-aware than in decades past, and the Covid-19 pandemic only increased the intensity of these changes. But are leaders keeping up? With some projections showing that only 10% of workers will be W2 employees in the next five to 10 years and the current booming gig economy, leaders have to be far more sensitive to employees’ choices to be effective. They are no longer the only option and those who don’t adapt will likely be left with the people with the lowest motivation, ambition, and talent— because the employees who have the most will drive their careers in the directions they desire toward leaders who are empathetic to the changing world of work. Being a human-centric leader is more important today than ever before. And after decades in the leadership space, I can say that being an empathetic leader has shaped my career. Armed with emotional intelligence, empathy, a philosophy around stress, and a solid

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group of assessments to help you understand your employees, you can be a truly human-centric leader.

The Tools and Skills to Become a Human-Centric Leader Everything in business today is driven by people. There’s no other way to do it. There is no organization that can successfully scale without understanding how to understand and deploy people. But to understand people, you must first understand yourself. I’ve always felt I got a good start when it comes to leadership. My dad was a human-centric leader— he enjoyed providing employment and giving people an opportunity to grow in their careers. He supported me as well, as I advanced in my career but, more importantly, I watched him support others throughout my life. That really stuck with me. However, I didn’t have the tools yet to know how to be the kind of leader that put people first. It was more of a mindset. Over the years, I began reading Peter Drucker’s work on supporting people’s strengths and neutralizing their weaknesses. I became passionate about understanding people better, which led me to assessments that help you understand a person’s skill development and behavioral traits.

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The Keys To Human-Centric Leadership

A Roster of Assessments I think it’s impossible to be a successful leader if you don’t have a good roster of assessments to help you understand people’s skills, behavioral traits, and motivators. Not only do they help you to be more insightful, but they also help you to overcome bias so that you can continually monitor your people and guide them to their best work. A leader has to be constantly learning, listening, and exploring, and with these assessments, I suddenly had the scientific tools to measure so much information. The more I developed my own understanding of these tools, the more I began to understand people and myself.

Two Types of Empathy

Self-Awareness and EQ This is where emotional intelligence comes in. It’s all about developing deeper self-awareness, self-evaluation, and self-regulation skills. The more self-aware you are, the more you can self-evaluate, and the more

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you will be able to understand and guide others. It may sound easy, but it is actually very difficult to know yourself. And if you don’t know, respect, and understand yourself, you can’t expect to truly know, respect, and understand others! Self-evaluation can help you better get to know yourself, so that you can choose yourself, create yourself, and give yourself. You also need the skill of self-regulation to manage and control your emotions. It’s all about being able to dive deeper into how you feel so that you can both understand and nurture your emotions. This is especially important, as the task of being a human-centric leader is not easy.

JULY 2022

Once you are more self-aware and able to self-regulate, only then you can develop empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand the world from another person’s lens, to understand what they are going through and what they are feeling.

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The Keys To Human-Centric Leadership

There are two categories of empathy, and I find it unusual for leaders to be masters of both. First, you can be empathetic to an individual and understand their specific, unique circumstances, and then there is being empathic to a group. This can be any kind of group with differences from the leader, whether in age, or economic circumstances, or world views. But an empathetic leader recognizes the challenges that still exist for that group in the workplace. And if they can do that, they can utilize that understanding to guide their teams to work toward a common good, much better than if they did not have that empathy.

Understanding Stress The skill of empathy is very useful in recognizing the major issue of stress in today’s world. Developing a philosophy around stress in the workplace is crucial for the human-centric leader. If your employees aren’t challenged, they will atrophy. Yet, if they are too challenged, they will also burn out and not be able to offer the best versions of themselves. A human-centric leader recognizes these challenges and works to create an environment and a set of skills around proper stress management so that employees can feel fulfilled in their work—so that stress is a friend rather than an enemy. Each of these skills and tools is so important for leaders to develop today. For myself, I define human-centric leadership as the obligation to first

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think deeply and clearly and then continually develop empathy for others with the goal of identifying their greatest potential and providing a workplace where they can do their best work. A human-centric leader is the kind of leader who makes helping people his or her job. With emotional intelligence, empathy, a philosophy around stress, and a solid roster of assessments to help you understand your employees, you can be the leader your people need in today’s rapidly changing workplace.

Ron Price is the President of TTI Success Insights and the former CEO of Price Associates. As an internationally recognized business advisor, executive coach, speaker, and author, Ron has worked in 15 countries and served in almost every level of executive management over the past 40 years. He is the Founder of The Complete Leader and the author of eight books, including The Complete Leader, The Innovator’s Advantage and Optimizing Strategy for Results.

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Cracking the Engagement Code

By Dan Rust, Infopro Learning

partially disengaged employee costs the employer approximately $1,200 for every $10,000 in annual salary, which is a bargain compared to the $3,400 cost (per $10K of salary) of a fully disengaged employee. This is according to research conducted by Frontline Learning, a corporate culture consulting firm. They define “disengagement” as an employee consciously choosing to do sub-optimal work, to do just the minimum necessary to keep the job and/or maintain the illusion of engagement. By some estimates, up

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to 42% of employees globally are either partially or fully disengaged in their current job. Frontline Learning calculates that disengaged employees cost the global economy up to $700 billion per year in lost productivity. Professor William Kahn of Boston University coined the term “employee engagement” more than 30 years ago in his 1990 paper, “Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work.”

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Cracking the Engagement Code

Employee Engagement 20-Year Trendline

Source: Aggregated employee engagement survey data from Frontline Learning, Gallup, Glint and Gartner. Since then, there have been hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and numerous research studies on the topic – all validating this essential point: Employee DIS-engagement on the job is an invisible burden on a business that significantly decreases productivity and increases costs. Over the decades since Professor Kahn published his paper, many companies have made significant efforts to improve engagement. According to a global study by the research and advisory firm Gartner, in 2019, companies spent an average of $2,420 per person on efforts to enhance the employee experience. This includes the investments they made in technology solutions, rewards and recognition systems, and environmental enhancements. B y some estimates, in the past 30 years, employers globally have invested more than $6.5 Trillion (That’s Trillion, with a “T”) in efforts to enhance employee engagement. So how is that investment paying off? Well, if the results of annual employee engagement surveys are any indicator, the ROI has been pretty dismal. Based on the aggregate results of global employee surveys conducted by Gallup, Glint, Gartner, and Frontline Learning over the past 20 years, there

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has been a steady decline in employee engagement. And the past two years have seen a further precipitous drop (see chart above). So we are spending an enormous amount of money, time, energy, and resources on improving engagement, only to see a steady rise in employee uncertainty, cynicism, distrust, and DIS-engagement. What we are doing doesn’t appear to be working, so how can we crack the code of employee engagement? Here is a bit of good news for you: employees have been telling us EXACTLY what it takes to “earn” their full engagement at work. The bad news is that we make not like their answer because it isn’t any one single thing. There is no holy grail of engagement, but we do know what they’ve been asking for. A thorough review of more than 20 years of survey data, including anecdotal comments and feedback from more than half a million global employees, has revealed the most current and critical drivers of employee engagement.These are: ●● Compelling Purpose – Is there a sense that the organization exists to achieve goals and objectives that are inherently important, not just

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Cracking the Engagement Code

to employees and business owners, but to the broader world or community? Do employees feel like their own work makes important contributions to these goals? ●● Authentic Leadership – Are leaders perceived to provide effective direction strategically and tactically? Can leaders at all levels of the business communicate with clarity and integrity, and are they trusted to deal honestly and fairly with all employees? ●● Clear Objectives & Expectations – Do employees know exactly what is expected of them? Do they know what a “good job” looks like, and specifically what type of performance is expected of them? Do they know how their performance is measured? ●● Adequate Skills & Resources – Do employees perceive themselves as having the knowledge, skills, tools, systems, and resources needed to perform their job functions effectively? To what degree could their performance improve if they had better skills or resources? ●● Energizing Environment – Does the physical environment help or hinder employees as they work to achieve their objectives? Do employees gain energy and motivation from their physical environment, or are they debilitated by it? Is the cultural environment accepting and proactively welcoming to all employees from diverse backgrounds, cultures, perspectives and lifestyles? ●● Pervasive Productivity – To what degree do employees perceive that everyone within the organization is making important (and adequate) contributions, everyone is productive, and no one is “hiding out” successfully? ●● Joyful Engagement – Do employees engage in their work with a sense of fun, humor, and genuine enjoyment? Do employees look forward to their typical workday, and do they bring their full potential for innovation, creativity, and exceptional performance? ●● Cooperative Teamwork – Within workgroups and across departments or divisions, do employees experience (and contribute to)

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a high level of cooperation and mutual achievement of tasks, goals, and objectives? ●● Rewards and Recognition – Do employees feel that rewards and recognition are fair, reasonable, and accurately reflect actual workplace performance? Do those who work hardest and produce the most value for the organization also receive the greatest reward for their effort? ●● Development Opportunities – Do employees feel that they have genuine opportunities to grow, develop, and improve their capabilities within their work environment? Or do they feel stifled and stagnated, and the only way to grow is to go somewhere else? Where should you start? With a clear-eyed assessment of your organization, aligned with the ten categories above. I know this seems like LOT. But is it really? Is there anything on this list that doesn’t seem fair and reasonable? These 10 engagement drivers represent the MINIMUM expectations of most employees today. This is what it takes to create a modern working environment that “earns” the full engagement of every workplace colleague. So you don’t need to “crack the code,” because the code is right here.

Dan Rust is the Vice President– Leadership & OD Practice at Infopro Learning. He has more than 30 years of experience as a corporate learning leader, driving employee engagement and leadership development initiatives for numerous businesses including GE, Disney Interactive, Bright Horizons, Singapore Airlines and Kuwait National Petroleum Company. Dan is the best-selling author of “Workplace Poker” (published by HarperCollins) and writes regularly for several publications on the topics of leadership and employee engagement.

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Human-Centric Leaders Are Psychologically Safe Leaders How to become a human-centric leader By Bill Howatt, Howatt HR

eople feel safe with people they trust. Trust is not something a worker must be taught. Effective leaders build trust with their workers by creating more positive than negative interactions and accepting that every interaction with their workers matters. Most interactions are filed as positive or negative. CEOs and boards of directors are becoming more aware of the urgency to change how workers are led because only 12.3% are passionate about work. Most employers, who want to retain their workforce, care about employee engagement and inclusion. Creating a psychologically safe workplace is a growing focus, with leaders as a critical ingredient. A former French Telecom CEO was jailed for “institutional harassment” linked to several employees’ suicide. This event suggests that protecting employees’ psychological health and safety matters, and leaders may be held accountable when they fail. Leadership buy-in and support are key tenets of a psychologically safe workplace. They create expectations for how the culture will operate and how leaders are expected to behave.

What is a Psychologically Safe Leader? Psychologically safe leaders are committed to driving fear and silence out of the workplace. They create

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Psychologically safe leaders are open and operate with an inclusion mindset. They ensure their workers feel welcomed, belong, and valued.

a safe space that encourages workers to share their ideas and opinions without fear of reprisal or consequence. Psychologically safe leaders are open and operate with an inclusion mindset. They ensure their workers feel welcomed, belong, and valued. Psychologically safe leaders understand their critical role in facilitating the employee experience by supporting a psychologically safe workplace.

How to Become a Human-Centric Leader To become a human-centric leader, a leader must accept that every worker is human and has individual needs. This means that to perform to their maximum potential, every worker must feel they can share their needs and believe their leader will hear them and understand their position. This confidence builds a safe, trusted foundation for a psychologically safe relationship between leaders and workers.

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Human-Centric Leaders Are Psychologically Safe Leaders

A human-centric leader is open to the possibility that they may have blind spots, so they regularly engage their workers to get input to remove any barriers that inhibit creativity, innovation, and openly sharing ideas. In his 2003 book, Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value, Bill George mapped key behaviors of an authentic leader. He used the Authentic Action Wheel, which includes five constructs. Each construct’s purpose is to encourage ideas and behaviors for leaders to engage their employees each day: Purpose — facilitates passion Values — facilitate behaviors aligned to values Relationships — facilitate strong connectedness with their team Self-discipline — facilitates being consistent and steady in good and hard times

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Heart — facilitates displaying compassion and empathy for the team’s well-being Though the theory behind authentic leadership is still forming, an authentic leader is self-aware, demonstrates they care about their people, puts the organization’s needs ahead of themselves, focuses on the long term, and isn’t afraid to show their vulnerability. The authentic leadership approach positions leaders to be human-centric leaders. Following are daily practices for becoming a human-centric leader: Champion the organization’s purpose. Accept how critical it is for leaders to champion the organization’s purpose and to role model its values to workers. Empathy. Understand others’ points of view without judgment. When interacting with workers who want to be heard, remove distractions and be present, attentive, and patient. Practicing empathy can curb implicit bias and ensure leaders acknowledge workers’ context, experience, and needs.

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Be transparent on motivation. Leaders’ decisions are not always viewed as positive. Be transparent in difficult moments; explain your decisions, and be open to criticism. This invites information that may influence a future decision. Reflect on your leadership style. Pause at the end of each day and reflect on where you could improve and where you did well within the five authentic leadership constructs. Challenge yourself with this question: “Did I move towards or away from being a human-centric leader today?”

Build authentic relationships. Get to know your people, what’s important to them, what they care about, and how you can support them. Be clear on purpose. Start each day with a clear vision of your purpose and commitments to your people and why focusing on them is more important than personal metrics. Show interest and explore ideas as they come. Accept that ideas are gateways to possibilities and new ways that may not be clear. Alexander Graham Bell likely got some odd looks when he told people about his idea for a telephone. Be patient with ideas and help them evolve by asking questions. Failing is learning — no worker or leader is perfect. Failing is a part of learning. When you fail, focus on the learning. Seek honest feedback. Constantly look for feedback on how others are seeing and experiencing you. Ask more questions and make fewer statements. Practice talking with versus at workers. Discover the employee experience through questions. Resist assuming you know best and have all the available facts.

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Employers are learning that the days when they could get away with talking about being a caring culture (i.e., psychologically safe workplace) are gone. The Great Resignation is shining a light on why workers are leaving their roles: they are not feeling respected. Rising disability costs due to mental health claims are causing boards to focus more on Environment Social Governance (ESGs), particularly the “S” regarding workers’ health. Humans are not machines, and as employers’ greatest assets, they must be protected and supported. Leaders are powerful tools for creating psychologically safe workplaces.

Dr. Bill Howatt is the Founder of Howatt HR and is known internationally as one of Canada’s top experts in workplace mental health. Dr. Howatt has 30-plus years’ experience in mental health and addictions counseling, HR, and leadership. He is active in workplace mental health research, Chair of CSA Z1008 Management of Impairment in the Workplace, and creator of University of New Brunswick’s Certificate in Psychologically Safe Leadership. He has published over 500 articles and 50 books.

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Leadership Is About People First How people-first organizations make people better By Emma McTague, Oshkosh Corporation With all of this in mind, companies have, in response, begun to change their working environments. Some have become fully remote, while others are adopting different hybrid approaches.

or the past two years, many companies, including Oshkosh Corporation, have had to learn to adapt to the dynamic challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Workplaces have shut down and reopened, facilities have been reimagined to combat the virus, and corporate cultures have had to change to align with the shift in people’s expectations around what they want in a career and in the workplace. The shutdowns, during the pandemic, provided people the opportunity to work remotely, and many have done so very effectively. People had the opportunity to reflect on what was most important to them and their families and have shifted priorities, which has also had an impact on the workplace. Additionally, many have struggled through the changes around them and where they belong, creating new mental health issues.

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These changes have been a test for many leaders. They have required leaders to think differently about how to build team collaboration and connection, while allowing the workplace location flexibility people want. Thankfully, many leaders have worked closely with HR teams to provide the appropriate mental health resources, leveraged Employee Business Resource Groups (EBRG) to help teammates connect with others, and utilized technology to more effectively connect teams These are just a couple of the issues leaders have faced in the wake of the pandemic. To support continued innovation in the workplace, there is an abundance of research on the future of work and the needs of tomorrow’s workforce. Data indicates that for our office teams, career advancement, a sense of belonging and feeling valued by leaders are critical components of engagement, along with flexibility and work-life balance as found by McKinsey’s ‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’ survey. In looking at what has worked well recently, according to a May Survey by the Conference Board, more than 70% say that elements of workplace cultures, including transparent communication from leaders and genuine caring by managers, have changed for the better since the pandemic started.

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Leadership Is About People First

People want to work in a culture where they feel valued, included, and cared for. It all begins with human-centric leadership - leadership that is personal and focused on treating team members as people first. As Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO), I have seen how People First leadership has benefitted our company, Oshkosh Corporation. We have been developing a People First culture for a number of years. In fact, one of our core values is “We put people first”. Our People First culture means that we treat people how they need to be treated. We see and care for the entirety of our team members: their mental, emotional, physical, and financial well-being. We celebrate what makes each of us unique, and we value others’ words and ideas. Finally, we respect the impact we have on each other, on the people we serve, and in the communities around the world.

How Does An Organization Create a People First Culture? Trust and communication are two critical components of a People First culture, especially right now. These components can help ensure the success of your team no matter where they work, and leaders who build strong relationships with their teams inherently create an environment of trust and communication. A big part of developing trust is listening. People want to know they are heard, and they want leaders to be open and honest with them. Having frequent conversations with each other helps build stronger relationships that lead to trust. Moreover, leaders need to trust in their teams to do the right thing, be responsible to stakeholders and each other to build a culture of trust. At Oshkosh, in addition to encouraging honest and open conversation, we use stay interviews, listening sessions, our engagement and exit surveys to ensure the voice of our team members are heard. We also have a program for our top 350 leaders, which provides them the resources to build their People First leadership skills. These skills include how to enable people to grow through effective development conversations and leveraging

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diversity to build an inclusive team. We pivoted a portion of this program to a virtual environment, and we are seeing the benefits of more frequent connection points with our senior leaders globally. Next, People First leadership demands a culture of belonging and programs around diversity, equity and inclusion. We are working to create an inclusive culture where everyone can bring their full selves to work. With more of our team working remotely and the ‘great exploration’ underway, creating a culture where everyone matters is a key differentiator. We are intentional in our efforts to promote inclusion – we increased our communications on DE&I, we launched mentoring through our EBRGs, and have developed DE&I learning paths through our learning programing. From a Diversity vantage point, our teams want to see visible efforts to improve representation. We have established a North Star Goal for Women and BIPOC leaders and have published our diversity metrics publicly. We know that diversity will also support innovation. Different perspectives, ideas, and thoughts lead to new and different ways of thinking that drive innovation. Finally, People First leadership requires leaders to provide a place for team members to thrive and flourish. At Oshkosh, the team member experience is front of mind for us. We provide benefits like flexible work schedules to allow team members to fulfill both professional and personal responsibilities. We encourage our team to participate in community activities and pay team members 8 hours of volunteer time annually. Similarly, wellness is a priority for us. We know the pandemic has impacted people’s mental health. We have brought on board more mental health resources than we have ever had before so we can provide different ways for our team members to get the support they need. We also offer a variety of programs that support our team members’ financial and physical health. We know when our team members can be their best selves and feel empowered to realize their greatest potential, our business thrives as well. We have seen this happen as our People First culture has grown.

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Leadership Is About People First

While this pandemic has caused hardship for many, it has provided an opportunity for more leaders to find their humanity. As more companies return to the workplace, it is important to remember to lead with a

human-centric mindset. We must not forget to lead as people. Our teammates have come to expect People First leadership in the past two years, and I believe they deserve nothing less.

Emma M. McTague, is Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Oshkosh Corporation. She has responsibility for all areas of human resources including leading the Company’s global human resources strategy, supporting wellbeing initiatives, promoting an inclusive workplace, managing talent development, and driving employee engagement. McTague previously served as Vice President of Global Human Resources for the Access Equipment Segment, a position she had since joining Oshkosh in 2015. Prior to joining Oshkosh, she worked with Hershey Foods for three years as a Senior Director and at GE Water & Process Technologies for 11 years in a number of human resources positions of increasing responsibility.

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The Characteristics Of Mentally Fit Leaders How do we find this type of leaders? By Jody Michael, Jody Michael Associates

f you’re like many leaders, your brain is often running on autopilot as it rapidly executes your well-worn patterns of thought, mood, and behavior. That’s the default path that we all take most of the time without any awareness of it. That default approach can be fine, or good enough. After all, it has gotten you to this point in your life and career. But it locks you into your current ways of thinking. Not only does that make growth difficult, it virtually guarantees that the things that trigger emotional distress for you today, will continue to do so tomorrow and the next day, and the next, and the next, keeping you from being the best you can be. But the other option—always available to you—is much more revolutionary and transformative. You can pause. You can think. And then you can choose to follow a different and better path, when applicable. Your ability to leverage these thousands of choice points throughout each day—to sustainably create high

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performance no matter what may be going on—is what I call “mental fitness.” Mental fitness increases your capacity, impact, and influence as a leader. You’ve likely heard politicians or the news media use the term “mental fitness” to indicate a requisite level of cognitive capability. However, I define it by focusing on optimized performance.

Here’s my definition: Mental fitness™ is your measurable ability to engage constructively in life and work every day, no matter what stressors you encounter. It is your capacity to consistently respond to challenges with optimal performance at the moment and minimal recovery time afterward. Mental fitness is most critical and transformative whenever you feel stressed, frustrated, or hindered in any way by your environment or by the people around you. In these situations, you inadvertently

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become triggered, and you default to behaviors that, to say it kindly, may not be optimal.

Mentally Fit Leaders in Your Workplace Take a moment to reflect on the people you have encountered throughout your life. Notice who stands out in a positive way. Over these years, how many mentally fit teachers and leaders have you worked with? If you can think of just a few, that’s about right. They’re rare. How do we find this type of leader, these high performers who maintain primarily anabolic energy throughout each day? Not surprisingly, they don’t walk around with a neon sign that advertises their mental fitness. In fact, the more that someone has developed mental fitness, the less their ego needs other people to actually know or acknowledge it. They are grounded and solid within themselves.

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The Characteristics Of Mentally Fit Leaders

not looking for others to fix things.

Mentally fit leaders are extremely powerful creators. They understand that their true leadership power lies within their awareness and their ability to be adaptable and agile in perception and perspective. They know at a deep level that they must be a powerful observer of themselves, other people, and the cultural, political, psychological, and business complexity of any given situation. Because they are present, and observing, when you are with them you are not going to see a lot of visible signs of mental fitness. The tell will be in the quality of your experience with them. You are likely to be your best self when you are around them. That’s a natural outcome of mental fitness and anabolic energy. It lifts everyone, creating conditions and relationships that make it easier for everyone to perform at a higher level.

●● They own their thoughts, moods, and actions, including their communications. They take accountability for their failures. ●● They are committed to their own growth and learning. ●● They don’t give in to fear or panic. They are willing to step into those emotional states and move through them. These states do not impede them. ●● They have a strong sense of self, an internal compass that guides them. They trust themselves to “do the right thing.” ●● They are empathic to others and others’ perspectives. They create followership because they lead with high emotional intelligence and thoughtfulness.

Here are some of the notable characteristics of mentally fit leaders: ●● They drive results with sustained commitment and execution. They initiate and move toward what’s possible, toward creating something new. ●● They do not deny or avoid reality, or merely focus on the positive. Whatever needs to be addressed is faced head-on. ●● They believe that they have the power or capacity within themselves to impact change. They are

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●● They understand what is and is not within their control, and they respond appropriately. When necessary, they are willing to accept circumstances and reality—“what is.” Let’s look at some examples.

Aware Alice Alice represents the first level of awareness of mental fitness, i.e., the beginning phase. She is aware—“my God, I am always defensive”—but she doesn’t know how to change. She lacks the skill.

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Aware Alice has more awareness than most people because she’s excellent at hearing, understanding, and processing other people’s points of view. She is accepting of differences, can evaluate what she hears, and can process it. All that is good, but she can be reactive—defensive, in her case—when confronted with positions that are counter to her own.

Curious Carl Carl represents the second level of awareness of mental fitness. He is aware and has some correction capacity, but does not always catch the problem at the onset. Carl does all of what Aware Alice does but adds a dimension. Curious Carl is not extremely attached to his own perspective but is profoundly curious as to how the other arrived at their point of view. He wants more granularity in understanding. Carl’s intent is not to pull from what he hears in order to build an argument against it, he actually wants to understand other people’s perspectives: “Wow, that is such a different viewpoint than what I was thinking! It is diametrically opposed! How interesting! How did they come to that? What am I missing, I must be missing something. What pieces can I pull in to understand my own view and what I’m not seeing?” He is anything but threatened. Curious Carl is creating, growing, learning, and sometimes changing.

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The Characteristics Of Mentally Fit Leaders

Presence Patty Patty represents the third level of mental fitness. She not only has the capacity to change but has changed. Presence Patty is Teflon. It is rare for her to get threatened and feel triggered. Whatever is in the room—competitive presence, divergent opinions, emotional states all over—Patty can take it all in. She can process and synthesize at a high level. She goes with the flow in the room. She is open and transparent; she

is not guarding herself. But she is appropriate too—she has high EQ. Presence Patty can understand what will trigger or threaten each person in the room. She is contemplative about what’s good for the organization and team. She is selfless in her own needs. She is not a martyr. Rather she has the perspective that “this is the least of your worries, there are bigger fish to fry.” She elevates others by what she says, the perspectives she shares, and the alignment she creates.

Leaders who perform at the highest level are mature, reflective, and secure. They’re not clouded by emotion, reactivity, and ruminating. They’re present in the moment. Their mental fitness lays the foundation for optimizing their performance. They have the capacity to handle myriad leadership challenges and conversations that come up moment by moment, both positive and negative. This is a state that minimizes pain for oneself and for other people. It minimizes stress, and it’s anchored in resilience— something that we all absolutely need today.

Jody Michael is the CEO of Jody Michael Associates, a premier coaching company specializing in executive coaching, leadership development, and career coaching. She is recognized as one of the top 4% of coaches worldwide and is an internationally credentialed Master Certified Coach, Board Certified Coach, University of Chicago trained psychotherapist, and Licensed Clinical Social Worker. She is the author of Leading Lightly: Lower Your Stress, Think with Clarity, and Lead with Ease.

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What Does Human-Centered Leadership Mean In An Uncertain World? Our best ideas often emerge from unexpected places By Désirée Pascual, Headspace Health

uman-centered leadership puts people first. That’s how I’ve come to understand this effective approach to building a successful organization — applying principles of human behavior in ways that support the needs of employees, and in doing so, help grow sustainability and profitability. Or, put another way: what’s good for the head and heart can similarly be good for ROI. But we live in challenging times. How are those human needs changing in the Covid-19 era, as the impact of the state of the world has become more present in people’s lives? What we have previously thought of as “human-centered” is very different in our uncertain climate and continues to shape shift. Making it work now requires a change in how leadership acts, meeting employees on several different levels. As a former therapist, in addition to my position as a human resources executive, I’ve seen up close how the events of the last two-and-a-half years have affected the psyche of the workforce, beginning

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with personal safety. Ensuring people feel safe at work emerged as an immediate physical need to reduce the risk of infection — remote work, masking, social distancing — and, the responsibility continues to live with us as our people return to hybrid and in-person settings. However, the stress isn’t just physical; our employees have a psychological and emotional need to feel safe as protracted disruption, burnout, looming economic turmoil and, more extremely, our national epidemic of violence, have breached our environments. Prior to the pandemic, most people weren’t as concerned about the multiple dimensions of personal safety in the workplace — now they are. Additionally, purpose and validation have grown in importance as expressions of human need, byproducts of the self-examination so many people have undergone over the past few years. For leadership, a human-centered approach now means recognizing that employees want to feel engaged in what feels like important work intrinsically.

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What Does Human-Centered Leadership Mean In An Uncertain World?

And, there’s one more crucial evolution to understand and embrace: in addition to the human needs that are cross-generational, there are generational differences brimming. Gen Z, which is predicted to make up more than a quarter of the workforce by 2025, thinks globally and recognizes that the issues affecting their sense of safety, purpose, and validation are collective — the environment, cultural equity, and social justice. No leader wanting to cohere the generational bands of the workforce spectrum should dismiss the personal relevance of those global concerns. It’s fair to say that this thinking didn’t define my approach — or anyone’s — to “human-centered” leadership before March 2020. This is what makes our jobs in human resources so complex. We not only need to consider the distinct mindset of our younger employees, we also have to find ways to leverage our existing workforce’s strengths, including their

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legacy knowledge, and bridge that intergenerational divide. Each generation has something to teach the other. How can we nurture a body of wisdom, life experience, and work experience in a mentorship capacity to those younger generations, and vice versa? Those inbound generations are teaching us how to do work differently and how to consider the whole self. So, what can leadership do today to support an ever-evolving human-centered work culture? The solutions will need to be bi-directional. One of the things that I have found throughout the pandemic is that our best ideas often emerge from unexpected places. We have to find ways to capture those voices as we adapt and design processes to meet not only the challenges but the exciting opportunities that are ahead of us.

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What Does Human-Centered Leadership Mean In An Uncertain World?

Discovering the means to solutions can be as simple as hosting listening sessions, conducting employee surveys and polls, and training our managers on how to have meaningful one-on-one conversations with their employees. In order to connect with their teams on the important mental, and emotional levels, leading with compassion is essential. A human-centered leader acknowledges that employees do better when they have adequate rest and feel safe expressing their needs. A human-centered leader understands that there are personal moments of high emotional impact when work needs to yield to life. Leaders who model compassion create an environment of psychological safety and mutual trust. Human-centered leaders understand that humility is the game-changer that inspires collective action and innovative solutions. Human-centered leaders understand that focusing on collective learning rather than on looking smart, being right, calling the shots or positioning oneself as the decision-maker is what unleashes the power of a team. It redirects the mindset of mentor and coach to collaboration and away from managing to-do lists. These sorts of initiatives cost very little but can hugely benefit an organization’s health.

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Leaders can cultivate a human-centered culture by merging the awareness of the issues affecting employees with the energy of both top-down and bottom-up action. Certainly, the evolving human needs of the workforce will continue. True human-centered leadership recognizes that supporting employee well-being ultimately leads to better business outcomes. Putting into place measures of compassion, humility, accountability, collaboration, and the equity of ideas will help businesses be prepared for more changes to come.

Désirée Pascual is Chief People Officer at Headspace Health. Informed by human-centered design principles and data-driven inquiry, Désirée is committed to curating joyful and resilient workplace cultures where employees are empowered to do their best work.

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Storytelling: How To Activate Strategies And Inspire Your People Are you ready to make storytelling a priority? By Rich Berens, Root Inc.

any leaders underestimate the importance of the skill of storytelling. In fact, storytelling is often viewed as a “soft skill” despite the critical role it plays in bringing strategies to life. But why? Leaders simply haven’t given storytelling the attention it deserves. It’s not unusual for people to get stuck in their beliefs and to keep doing what they’ve always done.

its activation is working. In reality, it isn’t working at all. There’s a reason we don’t take a PowerPoint presentation to our kids at bedtime, and it’s because this method of sharing information almost always lacks emotion and meaning. Yet it’s precisely what we’ve been using to communicate with our employees for decades!

Consider this: 100 years ago, dentists recommended that parents buy cocaine drops – yes, cocaine drops – to ease their kids’ toothaches. Fifty years ago, medical professionals were known to tout the health benefits of cigarettes, and just 40 years ago, carbonated soft drinks were promoted as good for you! Looking back, it seems ridiculous that people bought into these beliefs and kept them alive for so many years. However, we find similar belief patterns in leadership today.

Collectively, all of us, myself included, may not be as good at storytelling as we think we are. It’s time to address it, and we can begin by following these three steps.

Leaders Think They’re Compelling Storytellers. They’re Wrong.

To improve your storytelling skills, it’s important to start with the headline of the story. This is your vision. I can’t tell you how many organizations I’ve worked with where this vision is the result of too many leaders in one room coming up with a statement that ends up almost entirely devoid of meaning. You don’t want a headline that consists of buzzwords. You don’t want a headline that is so vague that it could be talking about any business or industry.

Over the past 20 years, we’ve found five blind spots that preclude us from leading people in the most enlightened way, one of which is storytelling. Leaders believe they’re telling compelling stories that resonate with their people. They believe the way they’re sharing their strategy and integrating their folks into

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●● Clarify your story with an effective headline. ●● Create shared meaning. ●● Tell your story in an authentic and meaningful way.

Creating a Powerful Headline

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Storytelling: How To Activate Strategies And Inspire Your People

As you think about the headline of your story or your vision statement, here are three questions to ask. ●● To what degree does this statement effectively describe what winning “looks like” or the exciting future state you’re working to achieve? ●● To what degree does this statement effectively describe what’s unique about what you do and the difference you make? ●● Does this statement create an emotional connection that makes people want to be part of what you want to do?

Aligning People Through a Shared Meaning The second component of good storytelling to focus on is shared meaning. Creating shared meaning is important, as one word can evoke different meanings and imagery depending on whom you ask. For example, if you ask a group of people what comes to mind when they hear the word “bear,” some might think of a polar bear. Some might think of a black bear; others, a panda. Some might think of the bear market. If a leadership team says the organization’s mission is about innovation or transformation, people will have different interpretations of what this means. When you ask people to execute, you’ll have a lot of options and ideas for how to do this. Without shared meaning, alignment is impossible. Without alignment, a successful action is impossible too.

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Encouraging Others to Connect to Your Story It’s not enough just to recite a story. Let’s talk about one of the most effective storytellers in history: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As the 1963 March on Washington came to a close, King was set to speak in front of a massive crowd. He had been working on his multi-page speech, which was filled with compelling facts and data about civil rights and racism, with his team for days. But when King began to deliver his speech, he just wasn’t capturing the crowd. At this point in the event, people didn’t want to hear about policy. One of King’s advisors told him to forget his speech and to tell people about his dream. So that’s just what he did. King spoke from the heart and connected with hundreds of thousands of people that day. While many of us will never have the speaking capabilities King had, we can all learn from how he leveraged emotions to connect with his audience and relied on authenticity to create a truly powerful moment. So, when you’re talking to your people about a new strategy, think about who you’re trying to reach. Are you conscious about sharing the “why” with your people? What are you doing and saying to engage them in it? Your employees are the customers of your story, the customers of your activation. Therefore,

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Storytelling: How To Activate Strategies And Inspire Your People

the words you use to share the “why,” “how,” “when,” and “what” with them are critical. Make your story powerful by telling it with authentic emotion so you can connect with your audience.

time is now to address this blind spot and ensure that the messages, strategies, and mission you’re sharing with your people are as compelling to them as they are to you.

It’s Time to Remove This Blind Spot Author, salesman, and motivational speaker Zig Ziglar once said, “People buy on emotion and justify on logic.” This is why leaders can’t rely on data and stats alone. We need to work hard to accomplish a goal together. It’s not enough to share a presentation or send an email. Storytelling is a leadership blind spot that has been facing the business world for the past 20 years. It’s time to address this. Collectively, all of us, myself included, may not be as good at storytelling as we think we are. But we can improve by: ●● Clarifying our stories with an effective headline ●● Creating a shared meaning ●● Telling our story in an authentic manner that connects and resonates with our intended audience Are you ready to make storytelling a priority? Are you willing to adjust how you’ve been doing things? The

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For over 10 years, Rich Berens, has had the opportunity to lead Root and its artists, designers, researchers, programmers, and MBAs in creating breakthrough approaches to change that have reached millions of people around the world. Rich has personally worked with dozens of Global 2000 organizations, including Hilton, Verizon, Masco, Petco, Procter & Gamble, Daimler, and many others to help align leaders and drive strategic and cultural change at scale. Rich is a frequent author, thought leader, and speaker on the subject of leadership, transformation, and how to create lasting change. Rich’s latest project is a book called What Are Your Blind Spots?, which he co-authored with Root’s founder, Jim Haudan.

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Technology Needs People Too Implementing sustainable leadership models in IT for long-term success By Ganesh Jayaram, John Deere

s workplaces are redefined and continue to undergo digital transformation, organizations need sustainable models to succeed. Even in the realm of information technology, human-centric leadership plays a vital role in these models as businesses evolve.

There’s a strong case for investing in sustainable models for IT success. Studies have long demonstrated the importance of IT expertise and competitive capability to a firm’s competitive positioning1. Newer research correlates IT capabilities and organizational intelligence to a firm’s competitive advantage and responsiveness to the business environment2.

Let’s Paint a Picture Consider what happens when firms do not invest in sustainable leadership models for IT. Managers become delegators, directing and prioritizing work for their teams while their own technical skills atrophy and team engagement and retention suffer. Firms focus on projects with finite funding and investment periods, which inevitably end with teams pulling out and resources moving elsewhere. IT groups function in a subservient role to the rest of the organization. The IT budget is managed primarily with a cost optimization lens, and IT teams must go it alone in pitching for new investments. Onboarding is seldom immersive, instead completed onsite as soon as possible; employee upskilling and engagement are treated as proforma checkboxes.

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If the success rate around digital transformation is any indication, those scenarios are not terribly far-fetched. A McKinsey survey in 2018 pegged the likelihood of an attempted digital transformation surpassing profit expectations at just 1 in 10. Four years and a global pandemic may have raised the urgency since then, but I’m not convinced the success rate has increased in lockstep. Short-term solutions may be easier to implement – it’s easier for a project manager to source third-party IT and turn on or off the spigot as needed, or for organizations to adopt ad-hoc agile frameworks without scalability – but it will not foster a model of long-term success.

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Technology Needs People Too

The Remedy To get sustainability, you need to start with human-centric IT leaders. The focus must shift from projects to products, which foster ownership through an entire life cycle, promote a customer-centric mindset, and incorporate feedback. IT leaders must lean into a collaboration-first approach with business partners. They must align with product management on measurable outcomes and serve their engineering teams by removing any obstacles to iterative cycles of short sprints to deployment. Business partners should accompany IT teams on new-business pitches to demonstrate a joint commitment to value delivery with an investment. Firms should form in-house digital product teams, comprising IT engineers and business partners, to accelerate speed to market, aligning on the full portfolio of an organization’s technologies and skill sets needed. Immersive onboarding should take several months, staggered in waves, if necessary, to get new hires over the learning hump to see what it looks like on the other side. And IT and the larger business should evolve together, a recommendation supported by recent studies3. For example, IT leaders and business partners should immerse their teams into agile operating models with training programs that give frameworks around how to jointly operate differently in the future. And the technology stack must be accessible enough for practitioners to contribute, understand and use it for self-development. Above all, the importance of employee engagement and upskilling are a must. Engagement should be a priority, benchmarking metrics like happiness, psychological safety, and overall job satisfaction. Firms should measure growth against assessments of current skills. They should build in retention with incentive programs to stay and upskill, as opposed to leaving.

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Finally, it’s important to remember that no structure is a monolith. Each team is different, and each will need a custom approach to implementing long-term, sustainable behavioral changes.

Stacking Up for Success Firms may see technology as chiefly a way to reduce labor costs or improve speed to outcomes, but human-centric IT leadership can merge those needs with innovation, quality, customer delight, and employee engagement. Even in a technology practice, sustainable models start with leadership. When IT thrives, so can the business. Notes 1 Bhatt & Grover, 2014 2 Awamleh & Ertugan, 2021 3 Agarwal & Sambamurthy, 2020

Ganesh Jayaram is the Chief Information Officer at John Deere. For more than 15 years, Ganesh has worked in a variety of leadership roles around business, growth, and technology at Deere, including recently as the Vice President of Information Technology. Previously, Ganesh served as the VP of Business Development, Water Quality Group at Danaher Corporation, and Director of Corporate Development at Canon USA.

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Empathetic Leadership, The Need Of The Hour Has mid-level management been given the right tools to handle the empathy that the job requires? By Janine Allen, Kaiser & Partners

ost of us are now agreed on the fact that empathy is a mandatory leadership skill, right? Besides the demonstrated benefits on retention, engagement, and ultimately, the bottom line, it’s a skill that will define future leadership success. The last two years have taught us that we don’t leave our personal lives at the (real or virtual) office door and that there are, in fact, humans at the center of human capital management. While this can be seen as a positive change in an otherwise challenging world, in many cases, our employees continue to struggle. We’re living through another period of change. The “re-entry” period, which we should be celebrating, is marked by geopolitical turmoil, threats of a recession and other external stressors. There’s still a very clear pressure on workers to balance the demands of work with personal demands and their own mental health. And good managers not only recognize this but are communicating with empathy and providing the support employees need to navigate tougher times. The positive effects of empathy then, are well-documented today. But what about the possible negative effects? Are managers at risk of empathetic distress?

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Empathetic distress is the idea that as managers, in offering unlimited empathy to our teams, we hear and acknowledge all the concerns and emotions our teams have. Then we take it inside, in order to put ourselves in their shoes and show compassion. But while this may unburden our teammate somewhat, what does the manager do with it now? Where do they put these emotions of their team, when they are dealing with so many of their own? This is empathetic distress. So, what can you do? Ensure they have the training they need. Set aside professional development dollars for every member of your team, particularly managers, to support leadership skills development, particularly in the area of coaching and people management. There are fantastic programs that help teach empathetic communication and better listening. Ensure managers have an outlet for their own stress or anxieties. This may be their own leader or manager, or another person they trust and can talk to at the organization.

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Empathetic Leadership, The Need Of The Hour

When more support is needed, ensure all employees have access to outside resources; perhaps through your Employee Assistance Program (EAP), benefits or other plans. Beyond providing resources for employees, creating a non-judgmental space where everyone feels comfortable and safe to have honest conversations about how they’re feeling is critical. There’s always

more than meets the eye, and it’s important to ensure that mid-management is set up for success as we navigate this next phase of workplace change. Prioritizing empathetic leadership – including tools to handle empathetic distress – will be a key bottom-line differentiator for organizations in the months and years to come.

With 20 years’ experience in public relations and marketing, Janine Allen, CM, is the President of Kaiser & Partners, a Canadian communications firm. Janine develops and oversees strategic communications programs that enhance visibility and transform relationships. She helps clients manage through challenges and change, protecting and repairing corporate brand reputation.

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A Blueprint For Culture In Today’s Changing World Why culture matters, what culture means, and how to create or change a culture By Dave Ulrich, Rensis Likert Professor, Ross School of Business

he study of culture is not new. In a classic book, anthropologists A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn identified 164 definitions of culture . . . in 1952! The study of organizational culture has also received enormous attention with the classic maxim: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Although Peter Drucker did not actually say it, he and many others have clearly supported this notion, with many books (over 100!) in recent years entitled “Culture (fill in the blank______)”:

With so many recent ideas about culture, let me offer a simple playbook for today’s culture agenda to help business and HR leaders navigate the culture issue: Why culture matters, what culture means, and how to create or change a culture.

Why Culture Matters Research shows and corporate directors, financial auditors, and business executives at Davos believe that “culture” matters and is an increasing challenge in today’s organizations, particularly with hybrid work when people may not be face-to-face.

●● Code ●● Wins ●● Decoded ●● Is King ●● Map

In the Covid world—when many employees worked at home often isolated from each other—cultural and social cohesion has declined, often leading to lower employee experience scores and increased mental health challenges.

●● Question ●● Playbook ●● By Design ●● Renovation ●● Change

Everyone readily accepts that organization “culture” exists and has impact. Toxic cultures have dysfunctions of hostility, mistrust, selfishness,

●● Rules ●● and so forth

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LinkedIn has even recently identified the top 10 voices on company culture.

JULY 2022

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A Blueprint For Culture In Today’s Changing World

scarcity thinking, and insensitive leaders who lower productivity, employee retention, strategic reinvention, investor confidence, and customer satisfaction. Abundant cultures have the opposite positive effect. Creating the right culture will enable organizations to flourish and win in the marketplace.

What Culture Means As noted above, “culture” has many definitions, even in organization settings. Let me suggest three historical waves of looking at organization culture and an emerging fourth wave (see figure 1).

Figure 1: Evolving View of Organization Culture

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A Blueprint For Culture In Today’s Changing World

Wave 1: Culture as values and behaviors. Individuals and organizations have values that shape behavior. These values can be identified as an organization’s culture, and the behaviors may be tracked to determine the cultural type. Wave 2: Culture as systems or climate. A company culture shows up in how information, decisions, diversity, accountability (and other processes) are managed. These systems determine the climate of an organization. Wave 3: Culture as patterns or norms. Anyone entering a company recognizes that unspoken rules or expectations of how work is done. These patterns become accepted ways of working. All of these three waves of culture (values, systems, and patterns) focus on what happens inside an organization. In some nomenclatures, they are the “roots” of the tree and are embedded in stories, history, and rituals, both spoken and unspoken. These internal definitions of culture thrive when employees are together to share values, work processes, and experience common norms.

Wave 4: Culture as identity in the marketplace. An emerging view of culture is to ensure that it is the “right” culture, which means that the culture inside an organization creates value for stakeholders outside (customers, investors, and communities). In this outside-in view, culture is about the value of the values to a customer or investor and the extent to which internal systems and norms increase customer share, investor confidence, or community reputation. This outside-in view of culture is less about the underlying roots off a tree (which are often difficult to change) and more about the leaves of the tree, which metaphorically change in different seasons. This outside-in view of culture integrates purpose, values, and brand to create the “right” culture, the one that creates value to all stakeholders. In this cultural focus, employees creating value for external stakeholders matters much more than how employees work. Culture change begins by identifying what an organization is trying to be known for in the marketplace. Then we make that external identity real to employees inside the organization (figure 2).

Figure 2: Culture from the Outside-In

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A Blueprint For Culture In Today’s Changing World

How to Create or Change a Culture My colleagues and I have been involved with numerous culture change transformations. More often than not, they start with laudatory rhetoric but then fizzle with few sustainable changes. When we have seen culture transformation succeed, it starts with the business case for culture (why culture matters), then uses the outside-in definition of culture (what culture means), then gets implemented in five steps (see figure 3).

Step 1: Define the desired culture. Ask internal leaders and external customers what your organization should be “known for” to be effective. This identity becomes synonymous with the desired brand that encourages customers to buy and investors to invest. Work to create a high unity (over 80 percent) on the answer to this question.

Figure 3: Five Steps to Implementing a Culture Transformation

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A Blueprint For Culture In Today’s Changing World

Step 2: Build an intellectual, top-down agenda. The desired culture needs to be communicated over and over and over again. This shared cultural message may appear in internal speeches, town hall meetings, social media, bulletins, and other communication mechanisms. Simple and redundant messages shape an intellectual agenda of what the desired culture should be. Step 3: Encourage a behavioral, bottom-up agenda. Cultural ideas and messages flow down—behaviors and actions flow up. Ask employee groups throughout your organization what they can do more of or less of to make the desired culture real in their day-to-day activities. Cultural messages change employee behaviors. Step 4: Design and deliver a process, side-to-side agenda. Culture gets woven into organization process around people (hiring, training, paying), strategic decision making, resource allocation, and other governance choices. The organization processes should reinforce the desired culture. Step 5: Create a leadership brand. We have proposed that the right leadership competencies should be aligned to promises made to customers, creating a leadership brand. Employees often do what leaders model, and when leaders think and act consistent with customer expectations, their work reinforces the desired culture. We have encouraged firms creating advertising programs to allocate a percent of this external marketing budget to internal leadership training on the same issues. These five steps are not a perfect script for the culture change agenda, but they suggest a simple (not simplistic) playbook to approach culture change that creates value for customers and turns cultural aspirations into daily actions.

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Implications So what does this culture playbook suggest? ●● Don’t just talk about culture ideals, tie them to customer and investor value so that culture has marketplace impact. ●● Don’t just diagnose what is happening with culture but offer guidance about what should happen to create the right culture. ●● Don’t measure culture with rhetoric but with results from employees, strategy, customers, and investors. ●● Don’t let culture become an abstraction but a set of concrete and integrated activities built around intellectual, behavioral, and process actions. ●● Don’t hesitate to make sure that leaders at all levels think, act, and feel consistent with the desired culture.

Net lesson: The culture playbook matters and is an agenda worth pursuing!

Dave Ulrich is the Rensis Likert Professor of Business at the Ross School, University of Michigan, and the Co-Founder & Principal at the RBL Group. He has helped generate award-winning databases that assess alignment between external business conditions, strategies, organization capabilities, HR practices, HR competencies, and customer and investor results.

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6 Things Every CEO Should Know About Branding Managing the human side of the business By Jane Cavalier, BrightMark Consulting

e live in an upside world where the old rules no longer apply. Many call it a VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Mass consumerism has been replaced by a new consumption paradigm as people are driven by new essentialism where things matter less and relationships, experiences and self-being dominate all. In this new world, workers are restless, customers fickle, investors skittish, and the public has an appetite to cancel. In order to rally everyone together to stand behind a company and its path during all the ups and downs, leaders need to draw upon emotions as rationality will not carry the day. They have one tool at their disposal to do this delicate work – the brand. Although often associated with marketing, brands are actually cultural icons that symbolically carry meaning. In

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just a nanosecond, they evoke common immediate meaning and emotions across all people. Think BMW, John Deere, Chanel, Apple and American Express. In a world where everything is uncertain, brands can be trusted to stand true. Now, if you don’t have a brand, you can build one. Anyone can. It takes commitment to people, to tell their story and represent their

JULY 2022

interests with your brand, not your own. If you create a brand that represents the highest common denominator between your people (customers, employees, investors) and your products/ services, then you can forge an enduring powerful partnership that will yield surprising dividends for your business. It all begins with understanding the basics of what a brand really means for a business.

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6 Things Every CEO Should Know About Branding

A Brand Resides in the Mind not in a Logo Although expressed in a logo and a tagline, a brand is actually a mental construct that gets into the mind and lives in the memory of people. Branding is the process of creating the brand in the minds of people. It is typically done by creating things and experiences that “express” the brand such as marketing materials and product design. Brands also live in the culture. Powerful brands like Nike become social concepts and exist in the culture where they continually give people cues and establish the brand as a part of society.

Brands Set Meaning Brands give meaning to products. Is an anti-lock braking system (ABS) a breakthrough in performance (BMW) or safety (Volvo)? That depends on the

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brand. The brand is a mental lens that provides immediate meaning. A Snickers bar is a snack. Tiffany means luxury taste and quality. Apple is about unleashing creativity while IBM is about improving productivity. The brand provides context which tells people why a product is important to them.

Brands Carry Emotional Power Like great art, brands are designed to elicit a response, both emotional and rational. Like art they can enchant and often captivate people which creates desire. Marlboro was the first filter-tipped cigarette and was initially launched as a woman’s cigarette which failed. The same product was re-branded as the ultimate masculine smoke and with the swagger of the Marlboro man still remains one of the most powerful brands in the world.

JULY 2022

Powerful brands are mythologies that evoke emotions that swell to desire.

Brands are Fiction Not Fact Branding is poetry, not journalism. Messaging matrixes and value propositions belong to marketers and are fact-based. Branding is another world that is concept-based. Branding brings out the big gun – an idea. A powerful, transcendent, mind-tweaking idea designed to engage the mind and heart at another level. The idea is what catalyzes new behavior and thinking. When Tide gets clothes clean, it means that Mom and Dad are good parents and conveys that message. The Home Depot is a large hardware store, but the brand makes it a Home Center for any current and aspiring do-it-yourselfer.

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shocks and disruptions seem to prevent ‘normal’ from ever being a reality, brands are a reassuring presence that people can depend on. Powerful brands nurture, the people that come to work, buy products, and invest in companies. Business always comes down to connecting with people on a human level. Powerful brands are creative concepts that stimulate imagination and emotions in ways that most CEOs cannot.

Brands Defy Logic When you have a powerful brand, you’ll be surprised by what it can do. You will see strong conviction and commitment across employees, customers, and investors despite challenges. People tend to defend the brands they love and stay loyal against all odds – better alternatives, cheaper alternatives, easier alternatives. To achieve that kind of priceless cohesion, you have to build and continually maintain the brand campfire - and make it into a bonfire for the whole world to see. At John Deere, they say people bleed green because the brand is so deep.

Brands Deliver Business Value Multiple Ways Because powerful brands are sticky, they have the ability to build a moat around the business. Customers remain loyal even in the face of superior performing or lower-priced competitors. People

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forgive and forget product and corporate errors which mitigates losses. People are more willing to try new products, services, and experiences from brands they love which accelerates sales. If you have the vision to build an empire, but a brand to amplify the upside and mitigate the downside. Many corporate executives view the brand as simply a marketing asset. Others like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk view it as a corporate asset, part of the business strategy. Once built, a powerful brand can be used to wield influence in many circumstances from Main Street to Wall Street to Capitol Hill. While products and executives may come and go within a company, the brand can endure forever – as long as it is well maintained. In a world of fake news, where people are becoming increasingly unmoored and where constant

JULY 2022

With a powerful brand, the CEO has a tool to open minds, raise hearts, command attention, bring everyone together and protect the business again in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.

Jane Cavalier is the CEO and Founder of BrightMark Consulting. He is a nationally recognized brand strategist, board member, blogger, and author of the bestselling business book, The Enchanted Brand (Amazon). She helps organizations conquer a changing world with powerful brands and reputations. Recognized for creating breakout brands like Snapple and Qwest, Jane has worked with over 100 organizations including American Express, Johnson & Johnson, ExxonMobil and the U.S. Navy.

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Building A Winning Team: A Great Team Needs a Great Coach By HR.com Professional Education Team

ttention HR folks, this article is meant for you to share with managers in your organization who want to become the best leaders they can be. Coaching shouldn’t just be about doing today’s job. You should also help employees think about their career path and enable them to grow in their existing role, move laterally to a new role, or move up to a bigger role.

It Starts with Your Heart Do you genuinely care about your team? You cannot be a great coach without heart. If you don’t genuinely care about people - if you are coldly tactical and distantly technical and efficiently process-oriented and leave your heart out of it, then your people will follow you only part of the way. They need to believe that, by following you, they will go places they would not even see without you at the helm. So sure, one reason you coach is to improve productivity, but at heart, it’s about heart. This is

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all about humans, so connect to your team members on a human-to-human level when you begin to coach. If you connect well, then you’ll be able to get the most out of your workforce. Many managers do not.

Why It Can Be Hard to Start with Your Heart We expect that you agree that it’s sensible to “start with your heart.” We all want to be open, transparent, honest, and humble.

JULY 2022

Unfortunately, that can be hard to do. Managers often feel they have to take on a certain persona as a leader and that ends up making them less than fully authentic. Managers might worry that they won’t be able to say the right things or give the right impressions. Some managers suffer from “imposter syndrome” where they feel they are not fully qualified for the role, and they’re afraid that if they are open and authentic, then they’ll be called out.

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Building A Winning Team: A Great Team Needs a Great Coach

There are many reasons why coaching from the heart can be hard. At this point, the most important focus should be on why it might be hard for you personally and what you can do about it. So ask yourself these questions:

The solution to this is two-fold. First, there are the obvious methods: phone calls, text messaging, video conferencing, and occasional visits. The second part is harder and really depends on your commitment to improving performance.

●● How comfortable are you coaching your employees?

The second part is making time to coach people who are out of your sightline. It’s relatively easy to find opportunities to coach someone you walk by five times a day. Those kinds of opportunities don’t spontaneously occur for people who are not in your location. You’ll have to build a schedule of check-in communications, and use those as opportunities to coach. That discipline is what will make you a spectacularly successful manager.

●● What might be hindering you from being open? ●● How can you make at least one little step towards overcoming the barriers that prevent you from coaching from the heart?

How to Coach True or false, no one has time to do coaching? (Especially you.) If you said “true,” we’ll give you a half-mark if you meant, “I don’t have time to sit down with employees for hour-long sessions

Take a Moment to Reflect on your Coaching Skills

helping them figure out their life.” You only get half a point because that’s not how effective coaching by managers works. Coaching by managers should be in continuous and ongoing short sessions.

As always, just a little self-reflection can go a long way to improving your management skills. Ask yourself the following:

Coaching from a Distance If your employees are in a different location, working from home or on the road, then coaching simply requires some different methods than in a face-to-face setting. The principles are the same; it’s just that you can’t pop into the cab of a truck barreling down the interstate to ask a driver, “What’s on your mind?”

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●● How can you coach your team to achieve team and company goals? ●● What is your current coaching style (if you have one)? ●● Is your present coaching style effective? If you believe so, what evidence reveals this?

Being Fair in Coaching Who do you spend the most time coaching? Is it the employees you don’t like? Is it employees you don’t feel really comfortable around? Unless you are some kind of saint, this won’t be the case. (If you are a saint, feel free to skip to the next section.) Be careful that you use your coaching time fairly. We say ‘fairly’ instead of ‘equally’ because there are some people who benefit much more from coaching than others, and you want the highest return on investment in your coaching time. We can’t give you a formula for fairness; only you can look at your own behavior to see if some employees are being overlooked.

Career Pathing (Looking Ahead) There should be a natural step from coaching employees about how to do their existing job and coaching them for their next job. Yes, they love working for you now, but they may not want to work for you forever. Most employees have ambitions of moving up the ladder at least a rung or two. As a manager, you owe it to them to help with that process. Hey, it may feel as if you are shooting yourself in the foot to help one of your good employees move to a new role, but not to worry. If you show an employee you care about their career, they are more motivated and more productive.

●● If not, what can you change about your approach to make it more effective?

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Building A Winning Team: A Great Team Needs a Great Coach

Besides, most will not work for you forever whether or not you do career coaching, so you might as well try to help them move up or laterally within your organization rather than looking for opportunities elsewhere. A great manager is one who coaches their team members to one day replace them! (Or who helps them get where they want to go in their career.)

The Nature of Career Paths Think about careers. How often do they progress in a series of straightforward, predictable steps? How often do new opportunities arise in totally unexpected ways? Since so much in life is unpredictable, you will not be able to give a clear career map for most employees. You are likely to find that you will have three main categories of employees: 1. Employees in roles where the next step in their career is pretty clear 2. Employees where the next step is clear but getting there appears unlikely 3. Employees where you have no clue what their next step up could be The first category, the clear ones, includes employees that have a pretty traditional career path where there is an existing job ladder. Job ladders are quite common. There might be a path of Junior Clerk to Clerk to Senior Clerk. In this case, it’s pretty easy for you to explain to an employee what they need to do to progress.

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The second category, where making the next step up is unlikely, will be harder for you to deal with. It might be the case that there is a clear path such as store clerk to store assistant manager to store manager. However, there may be twenty store clerks and only one assistant manager, so few will make it up to that next rung. Sure, you can talk to your twenty store clerks about this career path, but most will recognize that it’s not particularly realistic.

you like doing? What are your interests? Be honest with them that either there are no obvious next steps or the competition for that next step is fierce, but tell them you’ll work with them to figure it out. Think about extra projects they could take on; introduce them to managers in other departments where they might be a lateral move; encourage them to explore their interests and learn more about other jobs in the company.

The third category, the unclear ones, are jobs where there is no obvious next step. Maybe you have a forklift driver and you can’t think of a bigger job this person would ever be qualified for—unless it’s driving a bigger forklift (and you don’t have any bigger forklifts).

The reality of careers is that many moves are lateral, opportunistic and some are wildly unexpected. You can’t hand an employee a career path on a silver platter, but you can be encouraging, inventive, and supportive.

How To Coach Employees on Career Paths Where your employees are on a job ladder, it’s not too hard to manage coaching conversations. You do need to have a discussion with them about their career interests (which may not be on the ladder); you do need to explain what it takes to move up to the next step, and you do need to support them in acquiring the skills. Okay, you know all that, we’ll leave you to it. Go and schedule some career discussions if you’ve not done so. For the jobs with no obvious career ladder, you need to take a slightly different tactic. Again, start with the conversation. What are your ambitions? What do

JULY 2022

All you have to do is have conversations with your employees about their career interests, and then do your best to help them explore ways to get ahead. It’s their career; they’ll figure it out, but as their manager, you should be a source of ideas and support.

Thinking Outside the Box One of the barriers to having meaningful career discussions is that we think inside the box of “What is the next job up in this department?” That problem is too large for that little box. We’re gonna need a bigger box! The bigger box includes project work, volunteer work at a charitable organization, and temporary lateral moves. All those things can be options for moving someone towards their career goals.

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Building A Winning Team: A Great Team Needs a Great Coach

managers struggle with this. Here are some questions to help you improve your approach: ●● List each of your employees. When was the last time you had a brief chat about their career goals? ●● How effectively do you feel you help your team navigate their career paths to meet their career goals? Another barrier to meaningful discussions is that employees don’t have a good idea of what they want or what options exist. Those same tactics of getting people involved in things that are new to them (projects, charitable work, etc.) will help people see new possibilities for their life and career. If you approach career discussions as a process of discovery, it’s a lot more fun than if you think you need to specify exactly how and when an employee will get their next promotion.

Being Fair in Career Discussions There is a problem with discussing careers with your employees. It is a place where subtle (or sometimes not so subtle!) biases can run rampant. Do you tell the good looking young employee with the nice suit that they could well be the next CEO? Do you tell the hard-working person from a poor family that they might enjoy a lateral move, but only after they’ve proven themselves?

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So let’s take an unpleasant moment of self-reflection. Think about each of your employees and what potential career path you see each taking. Now think about how much that assessment of potential is based on superficial aspects of their style, background, or personality? If you are like most humans, superficial matters often play a big role in your view of someone’s potential. But in the end, you won’t be like most managers; you’ll be one of the really good ones. The main trick here is not to presume too much in your discussion about careers. Use a coaching mindset and ask a lot of questions. Answer their questions. Encourage them to strive to achieve what they want. Your job is to help each individual be their best. You don’t need to predict how high (or in which direction) they will go.

Take a Moment To Reflect on Your Ability to Coach Career Pathing Are you doing a great job of helping employees navigate their careers? Maybe not, many

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●● Can you think of creative ways to help people move towards their career goals? ●● What creative ways can you think of to help people broaden their horizons and discover new career goals?

This article is an excerpt from HR.com’s book, HR Fundamentals for Non HR Managers, which is part of the reading materials for the course HR for Non HR Managers. This course was developed to enhance a manager’s partnership with HR, improve team performance and avoid headaches in complying with national, regional, and local labor laws, or as we like to put it, “the stuff that your HR department wishes you knew or wishes you were doing as a manager”.

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