Three Ways to Win in the Global Talent Market

Smart companies win the right global talent by developing inclusion programs that make them attractive to the broad and diverse market.  Here are three approaches that can help you tap into global talent pool and win the right people:

• Focus on women.  To leverage the full global talent pool, you need to attract and retain women. Develop programs that help women clearly see their career paths and better identify, request, and secure fulfilling work assignments.
• Nurture global networks.  In global enterprises it can be difficult to make meaningful connections.  Pair employees across geographies and functions so they can gain exposure to other diverse talent.
• Offer flex.  More and more people are choosing employers based on their flex offerings.  Offer flexible work arrangements to all employees as a core benefit.

Adapted from “Three Ways to Fish in the Global Talent Pool” by Sylvia Ann Hewlett.

Stop Getting Bad Advice

People love to give advice. While it’s useful to hear what others think, sometimes they give off-target or foolish guidance. Here are a few ways to increase your odds of getting good input:  

• Target your requests.  Don’t ask whoever is available.  Create a list of people who have access to relevant resources, information, and experience on your problem and approach them first. 
• Frame your question.  Figure out what you need before asking for input.  Know what information would be useful to hear and help explore gaps in your thinking. 
• Redirect the conversation.  If the person offering advice jumps to erroneous conclusions, redirect them.  Most people will not be offended when politely refocused. 

Adapted from  “When the Help You Get Isn’t Helpful” by Ron Ashkenas.  

Three Tips for Creating a Realistic Budget

If you have to put together an annual budget for your department, your compensation may depend on your ability to stick to it. Here are three tips for creating a manageable budget:  

• Stay goal-oriented. If you aim to increase sales, make that your overriding concern. Don’t let other issues sidetrack you. 
• Don’t do it alone.  Include your team members in developing the budget — they may have knowledge about certain line items that you don’t. 
• Question your assumptions.  A budget should take current data, add assumptions, and create projections.  Be careful about the assumptions you make and question how likely they are to come true.  When you present the budget, you’ll need to be prepared to defend them. 

Adapted from the Harvard ManageMentor Online Module: Financial Essentials.  

When Choosing a Job, Culture Matters

Some organizations will excite you.  They’ll stimulate your success and growth.  Others will be stressful. They may lead you to quit before you’ve accomplished much or learned what you hoped to.  With the pressure (or excitement) of finding a new job, it’s all too easy to pursue a job opportunity or to accept an offer with only a hazy view of how the institution really operates.  The path to an institution you’ll like is to investigate the culture you’re thinking of joining before you accept the position. 

Sean (name has been changed) is a master at this.  He pursued a job offer at a Fortune 500 company to be the first Chief Administrative Officer (CAO).  He was well-qualified, presented himself well, and got the offer.  He’d been competing with capable people. He was proud he’d “won the contest.” 

The next step was a return visit, after which he’d decide to accept the offer.  Sean had already learned a lot about the company’s businesses and some things about the organization.  His priority now was culture and how the new position might fit: “I asked people, ‘What are you excited about? What are you proud of?  Who are your close friends in the company?  How does the group function together?’” Sean learned things like who the heroes were, what made them successful, and what his biggest challenges and opportunities would be in the job.  The different people he met with were learning from his questions.  It was almost like he already worked there, and they were jointly determining how to make the new role successful. 

Surprisingly, Sean turned down the offer. The new role was a misfit in the company’s culture. 

As he learned more about the company, Sean questioned how he’d be viewed as the first CAO in a company where everyone else focused on bottom-line results.  It was a highly performance-driven environment with lots of business units. Corporate staffs were secondary. 

“I asked how they’d keep score on me, how they’d really know I was making a difference,” he said.  “We never got to satisfactory answers to that question.  They weren’t hiding anything. This CAO position was a new one, and they didn’t really know.” 

Sean was concerned that this new position wouldn’t fit in the company’s culture, that he wouldn’t really be accepted, and that it wouldn’t be a springboard to the line job that he really wanted after two or three years as CAO.  He might have made it work, but why take the risk? 

It’s not uncommon for job seekers to enter organizations without understanding the culture and come away disappointed.  When considering a new job, be sure to investigate the institution’s culture. Consider these questions to guide you: 

1. What should I learn?  Understand the organization’s purpose — not just what they say they’re doing, but also how their purpose leads to decisions and what makes them proud.  Learn how the organization operates.  For example, consider the importance of performance, how the organization gets things done, the level of teamwork, the quality of the people, how people communicate, and any ethical issues. 

Except for ethical issues, there’s no absolute standard of what’s best in organizational culture.  Different purposes and different organizational features can be more or less appealing to different people.  When you understand how the potential employer operates, you’ll need to consider how well that matches your goals.  Your target organizational culture is an important part of your aspirations. 

2. How should I learn?  Read everything you can find about the institution, but read with a critical eye. Institutions have formal vision statements, and they often mention cultural topics in other public reports, but these documents are written with a purpose in mind.  Independent writers take an independent perspective. They can be more critical, but they can miss details and get things wrong. 

Discuss culture with people in the organization.  You’ll talk to people in the interviewing process, of course.  But you may learn different things if you meet others there who aren’t involved in your recruiting process.  Also talk to people outside the organization who know it — customers, suppliers, partners, and ex-employees.  Their different experiences with the institution will affect their views, so ask about situations where they’ve seen the culture in action.  

3. When should I learn?  It’s hard to learn about culture at an early stage in your search.  But your impressions can guide you to target some institutions and avoid others.  

Culture may come up in job interviews, although it may be complicated to do much investigation when you’re trying to sell yourself.  People sometimes worry that discussing culture might make people uncomfortable and put a job offer at risk.  The culture topic is certainly not off-base, and it is necessary to know for future growth in the company.  Hiring managers should expect it.  Whether it’s in interviews or after you have an offer, you’ll do best if your questions show you’re learning rapidly about the organization, taking the employer’s perspective, and beginning to figure out how to succeed there.  Culture questions can cast you in a positive light. Sean’s line of questioning confirmed the CEO’s judgment to hire him, even if Sean didn’t like the answers. 

What’s your view of how culture affects the job search? Has culture played a part in how you choose your future employer?   

Adapted from Bill Barnett who led the Strategy Practice at McKinsey & Company

Even High Performers Need Feedback

Some managers assume their star employees don’t need feedback.  They’re clearly doing a good job and they don’t need to improve, right? Wrong. Even your top performers need input to stay engaged, focused, and motivated.  Frequently give your stars both positive and negative feedback.  Tell them how much you appreciate their good work. Identify and share development areas, even if there are only a few. Talk with your stars about how they might achieve the next level of performance.  And, don’t miss the opportunity to solicit input on how you are doing as a manager. Ask questions such as “How can I help you improve?” or “What can our organization do to support your great work?

Adapted from Guide to Giving Effective Feedback.   

 

Collect Sustainability Data to Identify Savings

More and more consumers are making purchasing decisions based on a product’s or company’s environmental impact.  This means they are also beginning to demand more information about how products are made.  The reality is that many companies don’t have a complete understanding of their environmental impacts.  If your company falls into this category, begin by collecting information about your organization’s use of resources and that of its suppliers. This information can help you make decisions to save money, focus on more efficient processes, or build stronger relationships with suppliers that have better efficiency records.  While making this data available to consumers may not be feasible in the short-term, collecting the data is a positive first step to begin shrinking your company’s environmental footprint and capturing valuable savings. 

Adapted from “How the Wal-Mart Eco-Ratings Will Save Money” by Andrew Winston. 

 

Need a Mentor? Forget the Expert

When people early in their careers seek mentors, they often target those with a depth of experience. But experts can’t teach you everything.  And, often they are so far removed from your day-to-day work that they can’t help you solve problems.  Select at least one mentor with only a few more years of experience than you.  Someone who has recently walked in your shoes can give you practical, relevant advice on the challenges you face.  She may also give you insight into what’s coming in your career and the types of challenges you’ll be up against next.

Adapted from Guide to Getting the Mentoring You Need.

 

6 questions to ask a job interviewer

To stand out from your competition, says an executive coach, you need to start a real, memorable conversation. Here’s how to do it.

Dear Annie:  I’ve only been out of college a few years, and I was hired into my first real job (which I still have) by an on-campus recruiter at a career fair, so I don’t have much experience with interviews.  Now, I’m looking around for something a bit more challenging. I have some tech skills that happen to be in demand right now, so I’m getting interviews, and they’ve mostly gone pretty well so far.

My problem is with the part of the discussion, usually at the end, when the hiring manager says,  ”Do you have any questions?”  I research each company online beforehand, and can usually think of a few things to ask about industry trends or particular moves the company has made lately, but I keep feeling like my questions are too predictable (kind of boring, actually).  What should I be asking? — Just Jerry  

Dear J.J.: ”If you talk to recruiters and executives who are actively hiring, they will tell you they get three types of questions: no questions, bad questions, and — very rarely — memorable questions,” says Andrew Sobel.  ”The candidates asking the memorable questions are usually the ones who get job offers.”

Sobel, co-author of a new book called Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, Influence Others, is a longtime consultant and coach to senior managers at companies like Citigroup (C), Xerox (XRX), Cognizant (CTSH), and Ernst & Young.  He says a recruiter for a fast-growing tech company told him recently, “You’d be surprised at how many job candidates have no questions at all, or they ask dumb questions like, ‘So what do you do?’”

That’s too bad, because asking the right things is “how you create a thought-provoking conversation, which puts you a cut above the average candidate,” Sobel observes.

While there is nothing at all wrong with what you’ve been asking interviewers so far, he suggests adding a few of these to the mix:

1. Why?  Questions like “Why did you close down your parts business rather than try to find a buyer for it?” or “Why did you decide to move to a product-based organization structure?” — which it sounds as if you’re already asking — not only show you’ve done your homework on the company and put some thought into it, but are open-ended enough to spark an interesting conversation. As a rule, Sobel advises avoiding any question someone could answer with a “yes” or “no.”

2. What has been your experience here?  Without asking anything intrusive, you want to form a connection based on some understanding of the interviewer’s situation.

Sobel recommends something like, “I understand you joined the company five years ago. With all the growth you’ve had, how do you find the experience of working here now compared to when you started?” Or try: “What do you like most about working here?”

3. Show your value.  In the interest of making the discussion a two-way street, think about mentioning a technique or process you’ve learned from your current job that a prospective employer might benefit from adopting. Obviously, with this approach, you have to be careful not to reveal proprietary information or give away any secrets.

4. Focus on the future.  Ask something like, “You’ve achieved large productivity gains in the past three years.  Where do you believe future operational improvements will come from?” or “Looking ahead to the next couple of years, what are the potential growth areas that people in the company are most excited about?”  Not incidentally, the answers could give you a sense of where your own career path could lead if you get hired.

5. Find out about the culture. You can learn a lot about what it would be like to work at a company, Sobel says, by asking, “What are the most common reasons why new hires don’t work out here?” or, conversely, “What kinds of people really thrive in your organization?” Along similar lines, “Why do people come to work for you rather than a competitor, and why do you think they stay?” could yield some valuable insights.

6. What are the interviewer’s selection criteria? Sobel says you should ask, “If you were to narrow the field to two final candidates for this job, with equal experience and skills, how would you choose one over the other?”  You may not get a totally candid answer (the truth might be, for example, that the candidate with the lower salary requirement would win out), but you still might learn something worth knowing.

The right questions, Sobel says, “allow you to demonstrate your knowledge without sounding arrogant, and they greatly improve your chances of hearing the best question of all — ‘How soon can you start?’”

Talkback:  What questions did you ask in your last job interview? If you’re a hiring manager, which questions from candidates impress you most (or least)?  Leave a comment below.

 

Expand Your Mentoring Network

One great mentor can help you, especially early in your career.  But as you progress you need a network of mentors who can broaden your perspective and grant access to new opportunities. Build your mentoring network by creating a personal relationship map.  Identify the people you need help from to be successful in your current job and everyone who might help you advance your career.  Ask yourself which of those individuals you need to know better.  Leverage your current mentors to provide introductions and to fill you in on people’s backgrounds, interests, and current projects. With that information, you can make meaningful connections by offering relevant expertise or ideas, or finding other ways to assist.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from Guide to Getting the Mentoring You Need.  

 

Beware the Everyday Expert

Have you noticed that everyone around you now seems to be an expert at something?  How your boss gives you unsolicited career advice, based on his own (self-proclaimed) stellar career?  Or how your annoying colleague emails you stock tips after reading the morning news headlines?

Welcome to the age of the Everyday Expert.  In the past, if you were a career adviser, relationship counselor, strategic business consultant, or financial planner, you had to spend years acquiringspecialist skills or knowledge in a particular field to be recognized as an expert.  But with the rise of social media, the path to expertise — or more correctly, perceived expertise — has shortened dramatically.

Facebook and other social media platforms have ushered in an age of hyper-sharing, making knowledge more accessible than ever. More than 30 billion pieces of content are now shared every month on Facebook alone, amongst a community of 800 million members. It’s also easier than ever to publish your own content using today’s remarkably simple blogging platforms or on short-form networks like Quora. Perhaps the easiest way to self-publish is through Twitter, which is now addingeleven new accounts per second, on its way to 500 million users.

This social media explosion means that more content is reaching more people than ever before.  With a little online elbow grease, pretty much anyone can now read a few articles on Facebook, publish a couple of blog posts, and start calling themselves an expert at something.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to listen.

In this new world of democratized expertise, who are we supposed to believe?  Or in more practical terms, how can we tell which experts are likely to be giving us wrong advice?  During my adventures as an entrepreneur, strategy consultant, and author, I’ve encountered hundreds of famous, infamous, self-proclaimed, and work-in-progress experts. Based on my experience, here are the five Everyday Experts you should be wary of, regardless of what field they’re in:

1. The All-Star Adviser: This expert is a breakout success in their own lives and advises you to simply follow in their footsteps. With a large dose of hindsight bias and a hint of condescension, this expert applies their own professional and personal successes to your situation, arguing that you should do what worked for them. Why wouldn’t you?

Before you listen, consider whether their success was specific to their unique circumstances or more generalizable. Psychologists recognize how all-stars systematically undervalue situation-based explanations for their success.

2. The Blog Bandit: This expert spends hours each day trawling the latest business and tech news headlines, and passes off the latest management theory or stock tip as their own idea.  Too afraid to adopt an original point of view, this expert prefers the comfort of conventional wisdom.  Herd mentalitydescribes how people are influenced by their peers to follow certain trends, and this sheep won’t part from the pack.

Consider whether the masses are right, or whether they’re missing something fundamentally important. As content proliferates online, it’s much easier to amplify information and mutually reinforce ideas, right or wrong. The overall effect is often to legitimize false claims.

3. The Failed Forecaster: This expert predicts the future by extrapolating linearly from past results. Using incorrect underlying assumptions, this leads to disastrous forecasting, particularly in fast-moving innovation industries like technology.

Before you take their advice, ask yourself how closely the future will mimic the past, and how much confidence you have in prediction.  A comprehensive study of 250 economic and political experts making 80,000 forecasts over 20 years suggested that, on average, they performed no better than dart-throwing monkeys.

4. The Partial Pro: This expert is compromised in a way that makes it impossible to give rigorous advice.  Whether it’s Goldman Sachs advising both sides of the transaction or a conflicted tech journalist, it’s tough giving an expert opinion when you have a built-in bias.

To evaluate the advice, you must first understand whether the source has hidden incentives. Consider what advice they would give absent any conflicts. Aim to understand the source more comprehensively, and then make a judgment call on their advice.

5. The Deluded Directionalist: This expert confuses correlation with causation and falsely attributes movement in one variable to movement in another. Children in music programs do better at math, but does that mean you should teach your child the piano in order to boost their algebra scores? Misunderstanding cause and effect is often the root cause behind bad advice.

Consider which direction causality flows or whether it even exists. It’s disarmingly simple for experts to conclude that just because one event takes place before another, it must have caused it. This may or may not be true.

Next time an expert gives you advice, see if they’re listed above, and if they are, double-check what they’re saying. Are there other Everyday Experts you can think of?

 

Blog post by Daniel Gulati, a tech entrepreneur based in New York.  He is a coauthor of the new book Passion & Purpose: Stories from the Best and Brightest Young Business Leaders.