What does it take to earn a near-perfect approval from your people? What about having an astounding 94% of employees say they would recommend working for you to a friend? It takes true leadership and putting principles into action. Making them your walk and your talk, not just lip service or words on a poster.
Liz Wiseman is a New York Times bestselling author of three books, including Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. She has been listed on the Thinkers50 ranking and in 2019 she was recognized as the top leadership thinker in the world. She is a researcher, an executive advisor, and the CEO of the Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development firm. Some of her recent clients include Apple, Disney, Tesla, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you’ve ever played a sport or even watched a great team play, you know the importance of a good coach. Without a coach, even the most skilled players likely won’t reach their full potential. It takes someone with the vision to put the best team together, move people to the right positions, and train and encourage players to be their best to win championships. I interviewed more than 140 top CEOs for my new book, The Future Leader, and asked what skills they thought would be important for leaders in the next decade. Many of their most common responses fall under the skill of the coach, or translating those sports analogies to the business world.
HP has over 55,000 employees and like many other companies around the world they had to pivot to working virtually during COVID-19. HP was able to adapt very quickly and they have a lot of unique programs and tools in place to support their employees. Leading the way is Tracy Keogh, their Chief HR Officer and co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s global taskforce for Future of Work. Tracy and I talked at length in a recent episode of “The Future of Work With Jacob Morgan.”
As with anything in the business world, things evolve and change. The evolution that we are seeing today continues to shift organizational priorities more and more toward focusing on people and bringing humanity and experiences into our organizations. This is an immensely exciting thing to see! Years ago with the advent of what many would consider modern business, focusing on utility made sense. At the time, it was just common practice, and pretty much every organization took the same approach. Then, this shifted toward productivity, getting the most out of people.
If you only had a few minutes to share a message with people, what would it be? How would you make sure it stood out and was memorable? That’s a question that future leaders will need to ask themselves as they communicate with their employees amid their busy schedules and other obligations, especially as their organizations grow. It’s also part of the reason why communication is such a vital skill for future leaders.
Business will never be the same as a result of COVID-19. We are all being forced to challenge our conventional ideas around work. I’ve written a few articles about this looking at the evolution of work, the evolution of leaders, and the evolution of employees. In this article I specifically want to look at how organizations are evolving.
David Nelms is the former CEO of Discover Financial with 17,000 employees. Communication is a hallmark of David’s leadership style and played a huge role in growing his company and creating an engaged and productive workforce. He realizes that the importance of communication will only grow as how we communicate changes.
Companies are going through difficult times right now with the current pandemic, and while Pehr is not currently the CEO of a company, he is no stranger to leading during challenging circumstances, including recessions. When asked how current leaders are handling organizations during this tough time, Pehr says there is one critical thing that leaders are not doing a good enough job with
The world was changing quickly BEFORE COVID-19 and now as a result of the pandemic, organizations are changing faster in the last few months than they in the past few decades. We are having to rethink the technologies we use to work, how we design workspaces, where employees work, how we lead, and even what “work” means in general.