The door of the CEO's office opened after a few minutes of waiting in the lobby. He was the owner of a billion-dollar tire retail chain in a top international market. Our consulting team was vigilant in reading the room and answering all questions about the deep analysis we made per his request. He asked us to analyze and critique critical topics in their Strategic Plan, offering our support or vetoes to the ideas. We went through our recommendations, the reasoning, the impacts, and a straightforward conversation about every point and why not. Immediately after the conversation, he pulled out his desk drawer, threw our report in, and closed it, using his body language as a clear message that he would not request any follow-up about the work done. And then, he explained himself - "This is a family-owned company. Everyone seems willing to please my ears when they talk to me. I lost the ability to receive honest feedback. When I believe in a strategic direction, no one opposes me directly, so it becomes a dangerous bet. All I wanted from you is to hear your frank opinions about our Strategic Plan. Thank you, it was valuable."
The conversation immediately triggered me to think. That business owner had just spent a few hundred thousand dollars to hear candid feedback on the ideas he supports. That was his price tag for losing the ability to equip his team to talk honestly and directly to him.​

LEAD THE WAY

Many people use humor as a tool to cope with social situations they witness. A couple of friends use it in a particular way. When they see someone with a bad combination of clothes or colors or even an inappropriate outfit for an occasion, they like to say, "those persons have no friends" - meaning that if they had any, they would not allow them to go out dressed like that. Yes, mean and judgemental, but true. If we always have someone to give us a second honest opinion, it can save us a lot of face value when expressing ourselves out there. Many mentees shared with me this last year their regrets about inappropriate comments made in past decades about race, gender, and age that they could avoid if they "knew better." And to know better, we need to be trained to listen to feedback and, above all, welcome them as a valuable tool for advancement. 

Creating work environments where people trust each other and direct conversations can happen respectfully is priceless. If you are a team leader, your team members will quickly read your preferred form of dialogue and react to it. If you like to be flattered by your contributions, they will learn to give you compliments. If you are a data-driven decision maker, they will try to support their proposals better when approaching you. If you tend to be more process-oriented, they will always bring a view of the impact of their projects on the operations. So it is your role to hint the team in the right ways and be mindful of the desired outcomes. Communication can be tricky, and the more direct we talk to each other, the more clarity and productivity we will drive with positive business impact. Practicing active listening is a golden standard to refine common understanding and establish a team's way of understanding shared themes. Most high-performing teams master those skills. 


TEN HINTS TO CREATE A CULTURE OF CANDID CONVERSATIONS

Hence, you need to show the way and lead by example. If you put actual results above your own opinions, you will foster a behavior where all members will be more analytical and customer-oriented about their work. In a nutshell, be mindful of how you want to build your work relationships. Express satisfaction and gratitude for people challenging your concepts. Find compromises where possible and share the sense of ownership for all ideas with your team. Those are good ways to stimulate productive conversations in the workplace. 


Here are ten more hints to help create a culture of candid discussions in your group. 

1. Acknowledge every contribution to a conversation in a transparent way.
2. Value ideas that expand the conversation frame or go against your beliefs. Ask questions and clarify every point until you genuinely understand different points of view.
3. Invite more people to a topic if no one diverges from the same concepts and ideas.
4. Hire Mentors for you and your team members. Mentors will provide candid feedback on topics no one else can, and your team will learn essential skills. 
5. Encourage people to challenge you directly in an open forum.
6. Lead by example and always give candid feedback - don't forget to be nice when doing it. 
7. Center topics and conversations around desired results. 
8. Do not get stuck on arguments. Ask for more data to clarify sticky points. 
9. Practice active listening continuously, and coach your team to do it too.
10. Openly recognize top talent for being candid and respectful in conversations.

WORK SMARTER


Practicing that will make you more aware of every task and project and help you move faster as a decision-maker. You may save time in needless meetings and reduce time on others. You will encourage people to talk frankly to you, and they will always know why you made decisions that way. The halo effect of that change in people is breathtaking. More productivity emerges from higher engagement and collaboration as trust grows among peers. All desirable side effects from one intentional move you can do today. My last piece of advice to you is to go ahead and hire a Mentor. They will help you with your discipline and techniques to apply. 

When we read about the great resignation, we all can relate to it deep inside. Something during the CoVID pandemic has changed how we look at and connect to "work." More family time, uncertainty about the future, economic pressure, and other outcomes have severely affected most of us and how we want to harmonize work and personal lives. What we valued most before might not be it anymore. And when we all look back and forward, and analyze our leaders' abilities to handle us and our cases, that will happen through new lenses, more critical and aware of our values. The agility of how companies adapt and acquire new solutions to address a workforce that is more self-conscious and harder to please will determine the success of their People policies and, in some cases, their very own business viability. 
 
"The work deal started to become unfavorable for many people during the pandemic."
 
For C.E.O.s of companies of any size and People leaders, "The Great Resignation" feels real. And it is real. In 2021, one in every five non-retired U.S. adults has quit their jobs, says the March 2022 data from the Pew Research Center. In the last months of 2021, the jump in resignation neared 30% higher than in previous years - shows the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Check the Great Resignation in numbers in the graph below.

Hiring new employees is way more expensive than keeping current ones. It is not the case that a company would want to keep their low performers, and bringing new talent with new skills and perspectives can be very instrumental for team leaders. The mix of old and new can be potent. But keeping good employees happy is vital for any business. So, when you see your top-ranked resigning, retention comes immediately to mind. And retention solutions must go beyond the payroll, especially in times like this. 
 
Regardless of the fundamental reasons people decided voluntarily to resign in the last months, data shows that the work deal started to become unfavorable for many people during the pandemic. In this recently inaugurated new era of work relations, we all have experienced an unforeseen economic squeeze and witnessed mental health awareness assume a new protagonist role in the corporate world's list of concerns. Both were powered by people's unplanned available time to reflect and new personal dynamics at home. During the pandemic, many people reached the threshold where changing work scenarios became more attractive than stability in this complex new reality. The detailed data shows that the declared reasons for leaving vary with the employee's level of education, gender, and ethnicity. But they all align around a few themes:

• 63%, Compensation
• 63%, Development, and Personal Growth
• 57%, Toxicity
• 45%, Misalignment with personal goals

 
One of the simple definitions of change I like the most, says that change happens when the future state looks better than the current state. In the pandemic case, even the uncertainty of prospecting new jobs seemed more attractive than keeping the same old one for many people. It also should make us wonder how many more people are close to reaching the same breaking point and what that will mean as the total impact on businesses. Regardless of that math, it is clear that companies need to think of new real solutions to address new problems. 
 
"During the pandemic, many people reached the threshold where changing work scenarios became more attractive than stability."
 
The war for talent has been fierce, and its cost is too high to sit down and limit ourselves to registering our top talent's exit interviews. Numbers on the cost of losing top employees show companies must get their game together to avoid a more significant talent exodus from their ranks. And it is an accepted perverse truth that top talent goes first despite how hurtful that is. Precisely the ones your company invested more to retain will be the shining objects for your competition, and to make things worse, headhunters know that very well when they need to target your organization as a source. The known H.R. tactics to avoid its ranks becoming the prey of many attackers have lost effectiveness rapidly. And it is harder to fight resignations when the motivation is directly related to feeling appreciated and supported to grow. 
 
The good news is that a new crop of solutions combining tech and behavioral sciences is getting ready to be harvested by leading companies with effective People Management. Old approaches will not work well in those cases. In a recent survey of large companies conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity in Seattle (I4CP), many admitted they did not have precise data about the skills of their workers, making it impossible to identify true talent. Almost 25% of companies recognized that LinkedIn knew more about their workforce's skills than their own H.R. did. The truth is that companies' leaders need to act now. And as every employee is a particular individual with their own needs, the new H.R. will have to find solutions that can handle every employee individually and simultaneously scale to be cost-effective. 
 
 
"The good news is that a new crop of solutions combining tech and behavioral sciences is getting ready to be harvested by leading companies with effective People Management."
 
The trend where companies need to find individual and customized solutions for their employees is not new. For over a decade, companies started to create them, even in the old H.R. Most leading companies offer their executives a menu of benefits from which they can pick and choose. In Technology, companies offer flexibility to make people more productive. For example, B.Y.O.D. (Bring Your Own Device) and B.Y.O.A. (Bring Your Own App) are well-known and implemented I.T. policies. And now that employees are clearly saying that they want to learn new skills and grow to keep being committed to their jobs, finding customized and scalable solutions in L&D (Learning and Development) seems to be the optimal path unless you want to keep growing your payroll. Apart from compensation, L&D will impact the other three big groups of reasons for people to feel unappreciated and resign (63% say Development and Personal Growth, 57% Toxicity, 45% Misalignment with personal goals). 
 
Offering practical personal development opportunities will help your employees acquire new skills and grow. The right solution can help your people managers develop soft skills and reduce toxicity. And finally, you can offer development aligned with everyone's growth plans. Engagement and commitment directly stem from feeling your company is investing in you and feeling valued. Through my optics, I do think the Great Resignation is a byproduct of the many years companies have divested from employees' development. And it is time to empower H.R. to find those scalable solutions addressing every individual. That will show an impact on the overall business results, guaranteed. The effect of having most of your leaders and employees acquire new hard and soft skills at scale will improve every task and process of your company, adding up in no time. In this new era of solutions, H.R. has a real opportunity to show the real R.O.I (Return On Investment) in L&D, a task that was practically impossible before the help of tech. 
 
"The effect of having most of your leaders and employees acquire new hard and soft skills at scale will improve every task and process of your company, adding up in no time."
 
You can constantly offer a big raise and calm down a more significant exodus of employees. But that will not address the genuine reasons why people are gradually less engaged and committed to the business. You will need real solutions. Solutions that address the very needs of each employee and yet be cost-effective when scaling that up to most employees. It is time to act, and rethinking your L&D is the best starting point as it addresses the two needs you have now - look your employee's eye to eye and address their actual needs and help them focus on generating the results your business needs. That is the single most rational win-win path.

David McClelland pioneered workplace motivational thinking with his 1960's "Need Theory." His work changed the way many corporate leaders understood the relation between motivation and performance. They offered many counterintuitive insights about what using power meant in the past decades' business landscape and how the pursuit of power, when exercised in a controlled way to the benefit of the institution, can lead to higher performing leaders and teams. That correlation between motivation and performance will not change in the coming years. But new developments in the workplace are accelerating the need for better soft skills and consequently less egotistical leaders - the ongoing digital transformation and the new Y and Z generations aspiring to leadership positions. Those change forces will push us into healthier work environments, resulting in more engaged employees and trusted leaders, and finally, making high-performing fast-moving businesses more humane - the winners. Companies and HR leaders need to move fast to adopt new tools and policies to create the right conditions for change.
 
A 2003 HBR article based on McClelland's theory summarized their findings in this way - "They found that managers fall into three motivational groups. Those in the first, affiliative managers, need to be liked more than they need to get things done. Their decisions are aimed at increasing their own popularity rather than promoting the goals of the organization. Managers motivated by the need to achieve—the second group—aren't worried about what people think of them. They focus on setting goals and reaching them, but they put their own achievement and recognition first. Those in the third group--institutional managers—are interested above all in power. Recognizing that you get things done inside organizations only if you can influence the people around you, they focus on building power through influence rather than through their own individual achievement. People in this third group are the most effective, and their direct reports have a greater sense of responsibility, see organizational goals more clearly, and exhibit more team spirit." 
The article highlights an essential distinction on the good use of power motivation yet. "We concluded that the top manager of a company must possess a high need for power—that is, a concern for influencing people. However, this need must be disciplined and controlled so that it is directed toward the benefit of the institution as a whole and not toward the manager's personal aggrandizement. Moreover, the top manager's need for power ought to be greater than his or her need to be liked. Power without discipline is often directed toward the manager's personal aggrandizement, not toward the benefit of the institution." 
 
Leaders who use power without discipline are frequently incapable of creating trusted relationships by showing less caring for their team members. They tend to make their personal growth and benefit the only rewarded contributions. I remember a vice-president in a large tech company who had his entire team constantly working on "reporting better results" rather than producing actual ones. His team devoted hours and hours to massaging data and finding good angles to report advances in the many KPIs, so results always looked better than they were. For many in the team concerned about creating real value, the environment was unbearable. They could only see projects stalled with a lack of decision making and proper budget allocation, low visibility and promotion across departments, low management support, and the worst of all, no reasonable criteria on performance evaluations and promotions. All we could see were not engaged managers and team members, toxic behaviors and active rumor mills, unproductive meetings, and mental health concerns—an apparent misuse of power motivation. 
 
The California Business Coach Ed Batista notes in his 2006 article that "a high need for power doesn't necessarily translate into displays of power.
Uninhibited self-aggrandizement or abuses of authority shouldn't be mistaken for a good manager's strong need for power." He also comments that "McClellan and Burnham determined that the most effective managers were mature and disciplined, which minimized their displays of power and reinforced their focus on achieving organizational results. Mature people can be most simply described as less egotistic. Somehow their positive self-image is not at stake in their jobs. They are less defensive, more willing to seek advice from experts, and have a longer-range view. They accumulate fewer personal possessions and seem older and wiser. The best managers possess two characteristics that act as regulators- a greater emotional maturity, where there is little egotism, and a democratic coaching managerial style. If an institutional power motivation is checked by maturity, it does not lead to an aggressive, egotistic expansiveness. That means managers can control their subordinates and influence others around them without having to resort to coercion or to an authoritarian management style."
 
In today's reality, accelerated by the inflicted pandemic's more humane lens, managers have to adopt less egotistical instances of leadership. The internal pressures from younger talent (attracted by meaningful purpose work) and external from customers (requiring proper business conduct) impose leaders to transform themselves to their best versions and, therefore, the growing demand for coaching and mentoring from all types of professionals and officers. HR leaders and CEOs invest as never before in developing their people's soft skills and their own. Having truly collaborative and engaged teams is clearly making the difference in achieving sustainable results. It is also the only proven way to retain any company's most scarce and expensive resource: talent. Leaders who want to succeed in the next decade will have to evolve into coaching and mentoring, provide learning opportunities to their team members, promote collaboration, and honestly care for each one's health and inspiration. This change has already started. For the first time in a few decades, we have finally seen an improvement in the last Gallup's employee engagement survey - 34% of U.S. workers are engaged, tying highest in Gallup's history. And that is not a coincidence. 
 
Technology is playing a double edge sword role in that dynamic. From one side, it has enabled employees to work remotely, sometimes distant from their colleagues. It has also helped to flat organizations, making collaborative work more required for better results. Those changes do not make the role of leaders easier. It is hard to care for their teams and be aware of each member's needs and motivational levels. There is a limit to Zoom calls and Slack chat communications before burn-out hits. Gladly, technology is also enabling new tools, some powered by AI, to augment leaders' perceptions and insights around team performance management. Those tools are necessary to empower leaders and team members to develop and keep better soft skills—an essential investment. 
 
Time will split winners and losers in this race. It will depend only on whether you see humans as resources or understand you cannot resource humans but develop them. There will be no shortcut for leaders or talent bench outside to hire from it. It is never too late to evolve your people strategy, adopt new tools, and push managers to learn and develop new skills. ​