CESAR KELLER
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  CEO, Author, Keynote Speaker, Adviser
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Engage with the Future of Work and Education​

Effective L&D is the antidote to the Great Resignation

6/13/2022

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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.
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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.
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You want more power. So what?

4/5/2021

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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. ​
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CEOs, CMOs, HR TOGETHER FOR A FAST RECOVERY

4/8/2020

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Most of the office population is responsibly WFH. I see many sharing pictures of their monitors, making video calls with ten other people. That is a good start, but it is not sufficient if you want your team to perform in that new space. The path towards high performance requires a few solid steps, starting by giving meaning to the work of every employee. It also needs skills development, the right leadership, and technology readiness. CEOs, CMOs, and HR leaders working together can create workspaces where brand loyalty and employee advocacy fuel each other driving great results, even in times of crises. By doing so, they will accelerate the path to recovery.

PURPOSE

In the last ten years, for-profit companies are on a journey to reinvent themselves and embrace a more significant cause than profit to excite customers and employees around their offers. The ones succeeding in their transformation have an immediate opportunity to offer employees a highly desired benefit with higher chances to hit bulls' eye on the most pressing leadership challenge of today's - grow employee engagement. That benefit is remote working, and successful implementations require the right mix of technology and skills development if you want to harvest them to the fullest. It is time for CMOs and CPOs to hold hands and work together.

In this new decade, brands need a purpose as a token to enter the game. In a 2018 study called 'From Me to We: The Rise of the Purpose-led Brand,' Accenture's main finding was -"Purpose is now a powerful force helping companies build deeper consumer connections and improve competitiveness." Sixty-two percent (62%) of consumers globally want companies to take a stand on the social, cultural, environmental and political issues close to their hearts. Moreover, 65 percent say their purchasing decisions are influenced by the words, values and actions of a company's leaders, says the report. A MarketingDive's analysis of the story said -"Accenture found that a degradation of trust related to purpose can hinder competitiveness for a brand and cost potentially billions of dollars in revenue. But embracing purpose today also steps beyond simply sharing an opinion of a timely issue, and more often demands enacting a meaningful commitment to causes a company's core audience cares about. " It reflects directly on brand value too. Brands with a high sense of purpose have experienced a brand valuation increase of 175% over the past 12 years compared to the median growth rate of 86%, Kantar Consulting found. Nike's recent "Just Do It" campaign starring the free agent NFL quarterback and social justice activist Colin Kaepernick has become a bellwether for brands successfully communicating purpose in their marketing while also driving business results. However, as a number of researchers have noted, including Forrester and now Accenture, the purpose-led approach must extend beyond one-off campaigns and statements to read as authentic. Nike, for example, has pledged to donate $5 million to organizations dedicated to ending gun violence, per the ANA news release, said MarketingDive.

CARING LEADERS AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

The impact of purpose goes beyond building consumer connections. It helps to create healthier workplaces too. Businesses can learn from nonprofits and find shortcuts to reverse the current disengagement levels. In a 2011 survey entitled Engaging the Nonprofit Workforce: Mission, Management AND Emotion (from opportunityknocks and the University of Nevada)- a key finding was that "Engagement and mission attachment are directly related. Employees want to work for an organization whose mission they believe in and where they feel the work they do directly contributes to advancing the organization's mission. Employers need to focus on strategies to create meaningful work for their employees." They also concluded, "A positive relationship with one's direct supervisor is positively related to employee engagement. We emphasize the importance of management training, as managers are the most direct link between employees and the leadership of the organization, and have the most influence over the average employee's workplace experiences." And that was one area nonprofits scored higher than for-profits, employees felt leaders genuinely care about them. Caring trusted leaders are the utmost agents to engage employees and teams. 

It is needless to say, highly engaged employees drive better business results. A Harvard study showed a strong correlation between employee engagement and customer loyalty, which directly impacts business outcomes. Therefore, adopting a purpose for real triggers a virtuous cycle in business. It grows employees' engagement and, consequently, customer loyalty. It also attracts more humane leaders who are the key driver for employee engagement. On the other end, customers feel better served by those employees and better represented by the company's values. The cycle works like that - purpose drives engagement and attracts better leaders. Together they drive more customer loyalty and consequently better results.

REMOTE WORKING

Now, look at what Gallup reports on the importance of remote working to increase employee engagement. "Engagement is not an exercise in making employees feel happy -- it's a strategy for better business outcomes. It is true that engaged employees are more enthusiastic, energetic and positive, feel better about their work and workplace, and have better physical health, but engagement isn't a perk for leaders to dole out, it's a way leaders can improve KPIs. As decades of Gallup research shows, when employees are engaged their performance soars: Highly engaged workplaces can claim 41% lower absenteeism, 40% fewer quality defects, and 21% higher profitability. And job flexibility increases engagement." 

Continuing, "Gallup discovered that engagement climbs when employees spend some time working remotely and some time working in a location with their coworkers. Weekly face time with coworkers and managers seems to affect engagement: the optimal engagement boost occurs when employees spend 60% to 80% of their time working off-site -- or three to four days in a five-day workweek. It's worth noting that five years earlier, in 2012, the optimal engagement boost was experienced by workers who spent less than 20% of their time working remotely." 

And if we project to the future, the more leaders and team members get comfortable with remote working, acquainted with the enabling technology, and new skills developed, fewer office visits will be required. Look at our case at WORKPLACE21. We have been working altogether a little over two years, and we have never been in the same room during this period. Our team spreads across Seattle, SLC, Toronto, Miami, and other international locations, and still, we have a highly functional and collaborative team. We can get a lot done, and everyone feels productive and empowered. As a leader, I measure the high energy level and engagement. Both our purpose of creating a better workplace and our focus on helping teams reach high performance is the fuel to the high engagement we enjoy. 

EQUIP YOUR TEAM PROPERLY

Remote working can boost team productivity, engagement, and performance. Teams need to be compelled by its purpose, and also prepared and set for success, to deliver on those promises. Effectively mapping and developing essential skills are critical tasks to guarantee that teams communicate and collaborate well virtually. It is also vital to support leaders in the creation of trusting-working environments and coach them in becoming more humane and caring while setting challenging and achievable goals. Have the right mix of technologies customized for the various teams' realities is also a necessary condition to make them functional. Collaboration tools, file sharing, virtual working spaces, and few KPIs dashboards help team members belong even miles away from each other. 

ACT NOW

In times when remote work is mandatory, acting fast to create the right conditions for high team performance is crucial and how the best leaders will differentiate themselves.

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