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Why Coaching Works

Why Coaching Works

Why coaching? – It’s good for people, and good for business. It gives you all the benefits of corporate training – except people actually enjoy it and learn from it.

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the value of coaching

Imagine what your organization could achieve if everyone were coached to be their absolute best. – Sure, there are other ways to invest in your people. But have they ever brought someone to tears through self-reflection? Doubt it. Through coaching, your people get to know themselves. Their goals. Weaknesses. Hang-ups. And once they know all that, they can build on the good stuff and work on the rest.

Coaches change lives. And organizations. That’s why we’re here.

The Value Of Coaching

A Business Superpower For Everyone

Why not away days? Bigger bonuses? More vacation time? Those are fine. But they’re not tailored to each person. And they don’t have the same tangible impact.

Coaching is good for people, and good for business. It gives you all the benefits of corporate training – except people actually enjoy it and learn from it.

The personal power of coaching

According to the International Coach Federation (ICF), 99% of people who get coaching are satisfied with it, and 96% would recommend it to others.

Why? Unlike other benefits or training, coaching’s personal. It’s about your people, not the company agenda or corporate tick boxes. Sessions can touch on mindsets, beliefs, internal barriers, self-doubt, perspectives, work issues, home issues – whatever the coachee needs.

They feel more confident. They know what to do in tricky situations. They become better leaders. If that doesn’t sound like the model employee, we don’t know what does.

What’s in it for your organization?

It’s like supercharging your workforce.

Coaching makes them happier, so they’re more likely to stay. It makes them more confident, so they can tackle whatever they face. And it creates a culture of learning, so the coaching goes on outside the sessions.

We’ll show you the proof, too.

Coaching sessions are always confidential. But we’ll send you a monthly report outlining everyone’s feedback. And you can see data on how people are getting on with their objectives too.

All of which means you don’t have to take our word for any of this – you’ll be able to see the progress for yourself.

What is Coaching?

A quick intro to professional coaching

Professional coaching has definitely seen an upswing in recent years as companies grow larger and jobs become more complicated. But what exactly is it, and why might you need it for your team?

What actually is it?

The International Coaching Federation describes coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”

This means that a coach works with a client to define their professional goals and encourage self-discovery, and assists them in designing a plan that holds them accountable for making changes.

A growing demand

The stats alone show that the demand for professional coaching is constantly growing. Rapid changes in the way we work and our business environments has meant traditional methods of developing our companies and staff no longer yield the same results that they used to. As the landscape changes, it becomes a constant battle for employees to stay on top of their shifting responsibilities and goals.

In order to combat this, companies have to start committing themselves to developing their staff and encouraging their growth. Hiring a professional who can be trusted and who knows what needs doing is the obvious answer.

Why Get Coaching?

Why bother with coaching in your business?

The results from coaching will vary from person to person but, whatever your end goal is, it provides a perfect opportunity for both personal and professional development for your team.

Improvements across the board

According to the Harvard Business Review, ten years ago coaching was mostly used to fix toxic behavior. Nowadays it’s used for all manner of reasons across whole companies, not just at the top.

Whether it’s developing high-potential staff, helping to facilitate transitions, or encouraging someone in a new role, coaching is a way of supporting your team and promoting a positive environment.

Results for the long-term

It used to be that staff would be sent on short-term improvement courses, but this often only promotes a short-term change. In order to see long-term development, managers and leaders need to consider an approach that works to change internal thought processes and patterns. That’s where coaching can help.

As coaching grows, more studies are undertaken and the takeaway from them is that you can expect to see a marked improvement in your team’s positivity and productivity, their confidence and their ability to adapt and be flexible, and their attitude when it comes to facing challenges or obstacles.

Source: Ezra

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Career Transition, Outplacement and Mobility Coaching People Development

Reskilling the C-Suite: Leading into the Future

Reskilling the C-Suite: Leading into the Future

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C-suite executives are not being asked to personally match the reskilling demands that are being placed on other levels of the leadership hierarchy. There are some very basic things senior business leaders can do to ensure you are transforming yourself at the same pace and magnitude as you are trying to change your organizations.

I have always considered myself digitally literate.

I’m comfortable using all my tech devices and know my way around social media. In my position at LHH, I have regular and informed conversations with other senior leaders about things like artificial intelligence, machine learning and the blockchain.

So, when I agreed to take a digital literacy self-assessment a couple of years ago, I wasn’t all that worried about the outcome.

Turns out I should have been at least a little concerned.

The self-assessment is part of a foundational digital literacy course for executives offered by General Assembly, a sister enterprise to LHH in the Adecco Group. To my great surprise, I found out that there were several areas of digital knowledge where I just didn’t know as much as I should have.

That’s a tough realization for any executive leader. How could I be lacking in skills and knowledge that are so essential for success in the current business environment? That question strikes deep at the heart of a much bigger issue: the collective failure of executive leaders to engage their organization in reskilling and upskilling.

Unless you have starved yourself of all business news, you’ll know that the world is facing an enormous skills mismatch that could possibly leave tens of millions of working people around the world out of a job. Too many people are trained to fill jobs that are quickly disappearing; too few have the training and skills to fill the jobs of the future.

None of us can say we haven’t been warned.

From Oxford University and MIT, to the World Economic Forum to McKinsey, Gartner and PwC, the world’s leading strategic business thinkers, consultants and researchers have been warning us for years now that technology and the demands of macro forces like climate change are going to make many jobs completely disappear. Without urgent and focused investment on reskilling, there are going to be millions of people unable to earn a basic living.

And yet, in our client conversations and through all the available data we see at LHH, it’s quite clear that we’re not taking the action needed to address this urgent problem.

A recent survey by LHH of more than 2,000 hiring decision-makers from around the world found that less than half (47 percent) believe their organizations are trying to identify their employees’ transferrable skills so that they can be reskilled to fill future job openings. And only one-third are confident in their organization’s ability to deliver reskilling and upskilling programs

No matter how you cut it, those responses prove that we are just not meeting this challenge head-on.

So, why are the senior-most leaders failing in the face of the greatest human capital challenge in many generations? After considering all the possibilities and talking at length with leaders all over the world, I’ve come to believe that business executives fail to provide reskilling for their people because many of them are in desperate need of reskilling.

Many years ago, earning money as a student, I worked on an IT help desk that, on many occasions, required me to attend to the offices of C-level executives to help them with computer problems. Although some of these problems involved legitimate failures of hardware or software, in many other instances it was a case of executives not possessing even the most elementary knowledge of how to operate and utilize their technology devices.

Given that technology has a much larger role in all our lives today, the problem is just as bad, or maybe even worse now than back then.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review noted that while survey data is showing that the pandemic has accelerated the pace of digital transformation at most large companies, C-suite executives were not being asked to personally match the demands that were being placed on other levels of the leadership hierarchy.

The authors of that article analyzed job postings for C-suite positions across a broad swath of Fortune 1000 companies. The study found that while digital skills were very much table stakes for chief information and marketing officers, only 60 percent of postings for CEOs and 40 percent of advertised jobs for presidents included digital skill requirements.

This data is a pretty graphic example of the disconnect many executives have to the reskilling equation. We all understand reskilling is a key to transitioning people out of redundant jobs into more sustainable jobs in the digital economy. But many of us just don’t know how to make that happen because our own skillsets are lacking and the people around us are loath to tell us how far behind we’ve fallen.

Fortunately, there are solutions we can employ. In short, it’s time for executive leaders to start changing the way we approach our jobs. It’s not just the pressing need to acquire more and better digital skills; we need to start building cultures where the people around us can provide us with honest feedback, so we know where we need to do better.

When you’re at the very top of an organization, it’s unlikely that someone else is going to tell you that you need to up your game. You must find the motivation within yourself to identify those areas where you need to upskill or even reskill. There are some very basic things you can do to ensure you are transforming yourself at the same pace and magnitude as you are trying to change your organizations.

Get out of the echo chamber. One of the biggest problems that C-Suite leaders have is that if they get any feedback – and many do not – it’s not honest or frank. The hierarchies in many companies ensure that the senior-most leaders are never in a position where their performance is being critiqued. As C-suite leaders, we should seek that kind of feedback and be willing to act on what we hear.

Get a coach. I remind C-suite leaders who eschew coaching that all the best elite athletes in the world, both in team and individual sports, rely on coaches to help them perfect their technique and fortify their mindset. Coaching helps us confront and reflect on our shortcomings and focus on corrective courses.

Use a coaching mindset when leading others. One of the greatest parts of having a relationship with a coach is that it will teach you how to use a coaching mindset to get more out of the people you lead. A coaching mindset ensures that you do as much listening as talking, and that you inspire others by showing your confidence in them. A coaching mindset, or a reverse-mentoring approach to leadership, not only helps you embrace your own skill deficit, but it will help you start conversations with other members of the executive team who might suffer from the same problem.

Future-proof your own skills to help guide your organization. Even though you’ve reached the C-suite, you still have a lot to learn. If you want to build an organization that embraces change and welcomes reskilling, demonstrate that you embrace it in your own job. Take a digital literacy course, register for some Harvard short courses, make sure you are constantly reading books and news to keep up on what’s going on in the world. Show the people you lead that continuous improvement through learning is baked into the culture of the organization at the highest levels.

There is no escaping the pressing need to reskill and upskill to meet the future of work head on. Change is coming. And business leaders must demonstrate that they are adapting to the seismic transformations that are unfolding today and those that are unknown to us now but which we will face soon.

If you want your organization to follow you fearlessly into that future, you need to not only tell them what they need to do, you need to show them you can take your own advice. Only then will you be able to find yourself on the right side of the upskilling challenge.

digital transformation

“The overwhelming response from employees is the positivity in feeling rather than outcomes being dictated to them they have more control of their own destiny,” he says.

This article was originally published in C-Level Magazine on May 13, 2021.

To learn more about developing a renewable workforce, visit https://lhh.com.vn/the-new-roi/

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EQ: The Great White Whale of Leadership Development

EQ: The Great White Whale of Leadership Development

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EQ: The Great White Whale of Leadership Development

In a new survey of 500 people managers, a solid majority of respondents (57%) said that EQ was likely to be found in the highest-performing members of a team.

Author: Burak Koyuncu

It is the great white whale of leadership development.

Leaders who are not only technically proficient but also mature, empathetic and trustworthy. Leaders who are decisive but also listen to their teams before reaching a conclusion. Leaders who are attuned to the emotional state of their teams and demonstrate confidence to inspire others rather than to feed their self-aggrandizement.

Put it all together and you have a leader who embodies what people managers would describe as a high degree of emotional intelligence. However, while most organizations value these qualities, new research suggests that we regularly fail at identifying or cultivating emotional intelligence, more commonly known as an Emotional Quotient (EQ).

In a recent Lee Hecht Harrison Penna survey of 500 people managers, a solid majority of respondents (57%) said that EQ was likely to be found in the highest-performing members of a team. Not surprisingly, 75% of respondents use EQ to determine promotions and salary increases.

However, the same survey revealed more than two-thirds of organizations (68%) do not have any formal tools in place to identify, develop or leverage EQ. Further, only 42% provide specific training to help employees cultivate emotional intelligence. 

A Deeper Understanding of Emotional Intelligence

To understand the impact that EQ can have on the performance of an organization, we need to take a deeper dive into the qualities most often associated with emotionally intelligent leaders and the consequences that a low EQ can have on an organization.

We asked survey respondents to identify the qualities they associate with leaders who are emotionally intelligent. For example, more than half of our respondents identified empathy as a quality demonstrated by a leader with high EQ. The responses to our survey show very clearly that what have traditionally been described as “soft leadership skills” are in fact the key ingredients for EQ.

These qualities are not only growing exponentially in importance for existing leaders, they are also being used increasingly to guide recruitment and promotion decisions.

In fact, some survey respondents identified EQ skills as more important than experience in a similar role (13%) and educational attainment (11%), which have typically been considered precursors for leadership success.

Our respondents also connected higher levels of emotional intelligence with success in a series of critical tasks and responsibilities, particularly in the area of decision making.

People with higher EQ tend to be better able to assess the impact of their decisions on both customers and employees. It allows them to arrive at more balanced decisions that take into account all perspectives. That helps build support for decisions. People with low EQ might focus on purely numerical or non-human aspects of a challenge and will almost certainly ignore competing or alternative perspectives. 

Survey respondents also believed EQ is a key ingredient to success in leading teams through times of change (44%), addressing personal issues of employees (37%), giving feedback or employee appraisals (31%) and spotting talent (25%). Someone with a high EQ is much more likely to spot others with the same mindset and capabilities; low EQ hiring managers tend to either not recognize or devalue skills related to emotional intelligence.

This shifting mindset—and the growing recognition of the importance of high leadership EQ—may have a lot to do with the increasing awareness about what happens when leaders do not possess emotional intelligence.

When there is a lack of empathy, self-awareness or trustworthiness, employees can easily become disengaged from their employer and, more importantly, their customers.

Our research showed clearly that even when an organization recognizes the value of EQ, it may still have no idea about how to develop and harness its power. There are, however, several critical steps an organization can take to improve their overall EQ.

Assess and measure existing EQ

There are several assessment tools that can help organizations successfully measure the EQ landscape in their workforce. If an assessment reveals that a majority of leaders in one department score low in “empathy,” the company can intervene to educate those individuals in the importance of considering other perspectives when executing their duties. An organization cannot intervene, however, if it doesn’t know which departments have an EQ deficit or what specific qualities are lacking.

Integrate EQ into management practices

Learning programs can help bring awareness to the importance of EQ. However, companies can also integrate EQ into their leadership culture by taking steps to build a culture of coaching, where reflection, listening and collaboration are emphasized over quick judgment or imposing solutions. 

Related Article: There Isn’t a Better Time to Build a True Coaching Culture

Encourage leaders to learn from other leaders

Creating opportunities for leaders to gather and discuss their experiences can help develop EQ muscle memory. When leaders see the value of connecting with each other on a more personal or individual level, they should begin to see the value of using a similar approach with their own teams.

Create time for reflection

Sometimes, deadline and workflow demands make it hard for teams and leaders to just take a break and reflect on what they are doing and how they are doing it. It’s important to build in those pauses so that team members can discuss successes and struggles or failures. Creating those opportunities to reflect not only builds EQ, it also ensures people are not bottling up feelings of frustration or resentment. 

Build a pipeline

It is harder to cultivate EQ with existing leaders than it is to recruit new leaders who already possess high emotional intelligence. Consider incorporating EQ identifiers into recruitment tools like job descriptions and interview scoring sheets. There are also some psychometrics available in the market to identify individuals’ EQ values.

In the final analysis, EQ is about employees being more self-aware of their emotions and the emotions of the people they lead. It’s not an easy mindset to develop, but the payoff is well worth the effort. Leaders with strong EQ create an environment of trust and confidence that fosters strong teamwork and higher levels of performance. 

Source: lhh.com

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Restructuring in 2021: What are the risks?

Restructuring in 2021: What are the risks?

 

 
 
 

 

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Restructuring in 2021: What are the risks?

We explore the 5 key risks that get over-looked in a large-scale restructuring programme and how best to mitigate them.

Many labour market’s across Europe have largely been on pause throughout the pandemic. Whether through generous government and central bank stimulus or furlough schemes that subsidised wages of around 45m people1, employees and organisations have in some way been shielded from the fallout of the pandemic. As the pandemic continues to affect us all in 2021 the strain will be on these government schemes to remain, and on organisations to keep their people employed where they can. However, as we’ve seen already, some companies need to act now and restructure to survive and thrive beyond 2021.

33% of C-suite executives believe restructuring the organisation is a top measure needed to ensure survival2

The Scale of Restructuring

Although outlooks continue to brighten and some markets are starting to slowly recover, the unemployment rate is still expected to reach 8,1%3 across the eurozone and continue to rise through 2021. This isn’t surprising considering the significant size of the job cuts that have happened so far from big named brands. Even with the help from government schemes to prevent job cuts, we’ve seen companies from a variety of industries reduce headcount in the tens of thousands like never before.

With companies being forced to downsize in order to survive, organisations that will remain standing at the end of this year and beyond are those who handle this transition period effectively. Large-scale restructuring programmes are highly complex and require an extensive collaborative approach across the organisation as well as a significant investment in time and resources. The risks of getting a large-scale restructuring programme wrong can be huge and sometimes fatal for organisations.

Putting people at the heart of a restructuring program

Businesses will be depending on their HR professionals to deliver and provide support for a key part of any large-scale restructuring programme. Putting people at the heart of any restructure is what separates a successful process from a high risk one. This people aspect requires technical expertise in topics such as employment law, social plans and specific career transition approaches as well as programme management, communication and change management. Additionally, any complications that arise with various regional and/or local requirements will only add to the complexities of a restructuring programme.

Top risks in restructuring

Here are 5 potential risks that get overlooked in large-scale restructuring programmes:

1. Employee engagement and morale drop

Risk – High

The risk of low engagement and a drop in morale is high. Employee issues and concerns need to be addressed appropriately as any confusion or frustration left unattended will quickly lead to negativity that will seep onto remaining employees. Some of these concerns may also include how those who are leaving are treated as they evaluate how fairly the process is handled.

2. Significant productivity loss

Risk – Moderately high

Due to the inevitable disruption caused by a restructure, productivity will be affected. But by how much? If managers fail to lead and provide transparent communications throughout the process, the risk of productivity taking a significant loss is moderately high.

3. Employer brand damage

Risk – Moderately high

An erosion of trust caused by a poorly handled restructuring programme can have a negative impact on turnover, engagement and the employer brand. The impact of this may not be felt immediately but can certainly be seen over a longer period which is why this risk is moderately high. 

4. Restructuring goals not fully met

Risk – Moderately high

In the absence of clarity of what success looks like and how it will be measured, the restructure effort presents a moderately high risk of failure. The difference a well thought-out and realistic plan can make on the success of a restructure can be substantial. 

5. Negative leaver sentiments

Risk – Moderate

If any part of the consultation or communication process is dealt with badly, the impact on leavers sentiment may be negative. Even though these people are leaving the business, the risk is still moderate as any loosely defined processes, false starts or inconsistencies has a potential to come back and harm the organisation. 

With more changes looming this year, there are positive steps HR professionals can take to support their organisation with planned restructuring programmes. Putting the building blocks together now ensures that line managers, the HR team and the business leaders are prepared to implement a smooth transitional process and that risks are kept to a minimum. 

To learn more about how you can support your business and prepare for a large-scale restructuring programme, you can download our guide here.

Source: lhh.com

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Finding The Perfect Coaching Partner

Finding The Perfect Coaching Partner

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Finding The Perfect Coaching Partner

Faced with a pressing need to help your leaders forge ahead through an increasingly uncertain world, you’ve decided to take the plunge and partner with a leadership coaching firm.

What a smart cookie you are.

Coaching is a difference maker. In the world of development, it’s a superpower that can supercharge your people.

It can help leaders at all levels of your organization become more effective, more empathetic and more productive. Ultimately, a well-coached leader will help make all of your people more engaged and productive. It’s the ultimate win-win scenario in leadership development.

But for most organizations, developing an appetite for coaching is not the toughest part. The real challenge is finding the right coaching partner. And that, my friend, can be a real mind-bending experience.

So many providers, so many approaches, so many promises. The leadership coaching industry is a complex matrix of solutions, technologies and philosophies. It’s also an industry that is chock full of posers – fitness trainers, wellness gurus and holistic practitioners – moonlighting as professional business coaches.

In a bid to help you understand the true and full power of coaching and how to find your perfect coaching partner, we’ve decided to pull back the curtain and tell you a few things that many other coaching firms won’t. Think of it as your coaching partner checklist.

What leadership coaching is (and what it isn’t)

In short, coaching is one of the most powerful development tools ever created.

It’s a very personalized, intimate, one-on-one intervention that focuses on collaboration between coach and coachee to achieve pre-defined outcomes, some organizational and some personal. It’s all about setting goals, creating outcomes and managing personal change in a way that works for an individual leader.

Coaches do not “tell” coachees what to do; they help leaders examine the challenges they face and then identify their own solutions. It’s all about the journey to grow as an individual and the coach serves as a guide. It is, in every way, a true partnership.

If that’s what coaching is, then what is it not?

Coaching is not mentoring, counselling or training. Although valuable in and of themselves, those disciplines are more about imparting wisdom or knowledge to a leader. Although they may involve coaching-like approaches, the relationships are more hierarchical, particularly in a mentor-mentee scenario.

And let’s be totally frank. Although you may have many hobbies and share an interest in a particular type of cuisine, coaching is not about swapping recipes for healthy eating or setting fitness goals. It’s not guidance on yoga poses or meditation. Those are all valuable and satisfying activities. But they do not fall into the realm of professional coaching.

How to start a search for the perfect coaching partner?

If you’re company has never provided coaching at scale, or limited coaching solutions to a select few senior executives, then you’re going to have to do some homework before you can start looking for that perfect professional coaching partner.

To be effective, a coaching solution needs to be fully aligned with an organization and its leadership culture. There is very little value in providing coaching for leaders that is at odds with the expectations the organization has for those leaders.

So, methodically answer the following questions and record the answers. They will help to inform your search for a coaching firm.

  • Who makes decisions about leadership development in your company and what are their expectations?
  • How would your organization define the goals for your leadership and talent strategy?
  • How would you define and measure success in leadership development?
  • What are the ideal behaviour and mindset changes you would like to see from your leaders after they are exposed to coaching?
  • What strengths do you want to see enhanced?
  • How would you like your employees to act differently?

When you can answer these questions, then you are ready to start looking for a coaching partner. You now know how decisions about leadership development are made, the goals and modes of measurement and the desired outcomes. Let’s start shopping for a professional coach.

How to find your perfect coaching partner

Be warned: this is a very competitive industry and there is a huge variance between the real coaching pros and the posers. You will do much better if you understand how to spot a real coach but also if you have a list of must-have requirements.

Your coaching partnership must involve:

A firm that offers certified, accredited and 100-per-cent full-time, professional coaches. A coaching partner that takes the time to ask you question to find out your organization’s needs and desired outcomes. And you definitely want a coaching partner that will ensure that the work completely aligns with organizational and leadership culture.

You can deduce a lot of this information from reading a coaching partner’s website or marketing content. But a better approach is to structure an RFP that will give you all the answers you need to pick the right firm.

The coaching RFP checklist

Here are some examples of questions that absolutely, positively must be part of your RFP:

What professional coaching credentials do your coaches hold? 

There are a lot of self-trained, self-identified coaches out there. You definitely want someone with credentials from a recognized leader in the coaching profession, like the International Coaching Federation.

What experiences do your coaches have with coaching diverse employees from different backgrounds and industries? 

Your employee group is a collection of individuals with diverse experiences, backgrounds and career goals. Your coaching partner should be able to find you coaches that are similarly diverse and possess a wealth of related career experience.

How big is the coach pool? 

It’s important to have a broad selection of coaches to pick from. Both to ensure that your leaders are getting coaching when they need it, but also to ensure that there is proper fit between coach and coachee.

What languages do your coaches speak and where are they located? 

Business is a global concern now and coaching needs to be able to reflect a broad array of languages, cultures, and time zones.

What is the diversity mix of your coaches? For example, gender, racial diversity, LGBTQ+

Diversity and inclusion are important considerations in picking a coaching partner. You definitely want a partner that can draw upon an extremely diverse roster of coaches that reflect the importance of gender, race and sexual orientation.

How do you match coaches with employees? 

Coaching firms with small coach rosters will not allow for an intensive matching process. A broad and deep pool of coaches, and a process that helps coachees identify the kind of person they want to work with, will ensure a good match.

Describe your coaching process?

Even with global certifications, different firms still employee different models of coaching. Ask a prospective coaching partner to define their approach. As well, is there a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach or flexibility to design coaching solutions that fit the individual?

What type of technology do you use for the coaching platform?

With the pandemic still impacting face-to-face business interactions, it’s more important than ever to know the full details of your coaching partner’s technology platform. If not in person, then how will they deliver coaching? Will they rely on off-the-shelf video conferencing apps, or do they have a full proprietary platform that allows for seamless integration of coaching with scheduling, feedback and the measuring of outcomes?

Can your coaching partner measure outcomes?

Many coaching providers deliver the service but offer no way of gathering insights or generating reports on feedback and outcomes. If your organization is paying the freight for coaching, don’t you want to know the impact it’s having on your people?

Who are some of your clients and what do they have to say about your work?

Testimonials from other client organizations are a very good way of assessing the quality of any coaching firm. Let’s face it, if a coaching partner is good at their job, why wouldn’t clients want to sing it from the rooftops.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it’s certainly a good start and it captures many of the most important questions to ask a prospective coaching partner.

Coaching can have a profound impact on an organization and its people. But only if you have taken the time to find the best coaching partner. Best in terms of service, technology and outcomes.

Source: helloezra.com

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Talent Assessment: Three Ways to Reimagine Your 2021 Talent Development Budget

Talent Assessment: Three Ways to Reimagine Your 2021 Talent Development Budget

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Talent assessments provide detailed insight into your workforce that can help you identify where to make the most impactful investments and where you can save on training and development efforts.

Matthew Such, Ph.D., SVP, Product and Solutions, Global Head of Assessment, LHH

Under normal circumstances, prioritizing training and development needs can be daunting for any HR professional. Undertaking that task amid seismic market disruptions can be nothing short of overwhelming.

The talent development decisions you make now are critical. The current, dynamic business environment is creating an enormous demand for new skills and capabilities. At the same time, organizations are struggling to source and cultivate talent internally. To effectively manage these challenges, HR leaders need data and insights to make smart, informed investments that align with internal strategic objectives and external macro-economic forces.

Investing in the development of your talent is essential. And yet, how much do you know about it?

Your talent not only represents the single largest line item in your operating budget, it’s also the single largest factor that will determine your business’s growth potential. And yet, how much do you really know about your existing talent and what learning opportunities they need to meet the increasing demands on your organization? What you don’t know about your talent today ultimately will hurt you in the future. 

Strategic talent assessment creates objective, actionable insights that help inform targeted investments throughout the talent lifecycle, taking the guessing out of talent and development planning.

Assessment use is not limited to the recruitment and hiring process

While assessments often are associated with the recruitment process, forward-thinking organizations use them to create insights throughout the employment lifecycle. Talent assessment results provide invaluable input into defining, planning, and prioritizing activities around training, development, and hiring that can ultimately help align your talent and business strategies. 

Here are three ways assessments can help you define and prioritize talent development needs in your organization.

1. Reveal strengths and development opportunities in existing talent

If your current method for analyzing development needs is to rely on the opinions of managers and leaders, then it’s time to shift your approach. While this input can be helpful, it also tends to be reactive, biased, and not future-focused. Simply put, it is inappropriate to rely on the gut feeling of managers for informed decisions about broader development needs within your organization. Systematic use of talent assessment yields an objective picture of your workforce that allows you to determine how well aligned it is with the current and future needs of your business. With these insights in hand, you can get the most from each person’s day-to-day performance, prioritize talent development efforts in areas where it is truly needed and avoid spending time and money in areas where you already have substantial strength.

2. Fill key talent gaps

Effectively anticipating and satisfying the demand for new and different skills required to meet business needs is already a mission-critical priority for HR leaders. Talent assessment helps you address this challenge by:

• Identifying future skill gaps within the workforce; 
• Determining whether the organization has enough existing talent to meet future needs, and;
• Highlighting the extent to which external hiring will be required to fill critical gaps.  

If your organization lacks sufficient staff to develop, or if the skills your organization needs do not lend themselves to development efforts, you may be best served to hire from outside the organization. Taking such an approach to quantifying talent through assessment allows you to create long-term strategies to ensure you always know how to find and deploy the right talent, whether it is sourced internally or externally.

3. Identify high-potentials and future-ready leaders

How often have you seen investments in high-potential and leadership programs wasted—or worse—the people you just invested in walk out the door? To get the most out of talent development investments, you must identify the right talent to drive your organization in meeting its near- and long-term business goals. 

Ensuring you identify and develop the right future leaders to drive your business ahead requires understanding the difference between high-performers and high-potentials. High performers are vital to the organization and drive results within their current roles. High potentials, on the other hand, have specific attributes that allow them to advance to more senior leadership roles. Assessments can help identify both high performers and high potentials. More importantly, it will tell you how to make best use of them going forward into the future. 

For example, assessment data allows you to thoughtfully plan how to best leverage your high potentials’ existing critical capabilities and expertise, while identifying development paths for those who may require further training to meet future strategic needs. 

Whether you are feeling uncertain about your talent development plan for next year or just unsure what skills your people have and need, talent assessment will enable you to make confident, evidence-based decisions. 

Talent assessment produces objective evidence about where to make the most impactful talent development investments, where you can save on those efforts, and also, how to quickly find talent who will drive your organization’s success. 

Even if you have started your 2021 talent development plan, adding assessments to the mix can reveal new ways to refine and prioritize needs within that plan and maximize your ability to help drive your organization’s growth and on-going success.

Source: lhh.com

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A Paradigm Shift: Leaders Who Coach

A Paradigm Shift: Leaders Who Coach

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A Paradigm Shift Leaders Who Coach

“We knew at that point that coaching skills would help them slow down, tune into someone else’s concerns while still allowing them the time to engage in some self-care.”

Linda Lindberg, Vice President and Head of Commercial Management for Ericsson Market Area South East Asia, Oceania and India

Is a pandemic the right time to train line managers in coaching culture? 

In early 2020, that was the question facing leaders at Ericsson, the iconic Swedish telecommunications company, across the 11 countries in the Oceania, South East Asia and India market area.

Like many companies, Ericsson was anticipating a paradigm shift in leadership culture, with new behaviors, mindsets and skills emerging to meet new and often unpredictable needs of markets and employees. And with so many restrictions on the normal ebb and flow of commerce, the emphasis on developing home-grown leaders had never been as pronounced.

Ericsson had been planning for some months to do a massive leadership development and coaching skills program for all levels of leadership across the region. But when the pandemic struck, the 450 leaders who were the target for this program and the 9,000 employees they oversaw were suddenly forced to work from home.

Did it make sense to follow through with the training when managers and the people they were managing were so isolated from each other? Very quickly, Ericsson leadership determined that it not only made sense, it was essential.

“We knew for some time that we wanted to help our line leaders evolve into strong coaches,” said Priyanka Anand, Vice President and Head of Human Resources for Ericsson Market Area South East Asia, Oceania and India. “When the pandemic hit, it was clear early on that this wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. We also began to realize that helping our leaders deal with the stress and anxiety that their employees were going through was very important.”

In the past, many organizations would have looked at resilience or change management seminars when faced with an operational challenge like the pandemic. However, Anand said there was a strong sense that giving line leaders some insight into coaching culture might do more than just calm their nerves in the face of an unnerving situation.

The program that had been designed in part before the pandemic hit focused on five core goals, she said. 

  • Increase ability to make courageous and fact-based decisions.
  • Increase empathy for different perspectives and approaches.
  • Increase cross-company cooperation
  • Increase capacity to execute decisions quickly
  • Increase support for a “speak-up environment.”

Coaching culture, Anand said, was a clear path to connect all these priorities. “We wanted to evolve our leaders into being strong coaches,” she said. “To help their employees, we needed these leaders to be more empathetic. To do that, we needed them to know that they didn’t always have to give advice; sometimes listening is the most important thing they can do. And that helps create an environment where employees feel safe to speak up and express themselves.”

Linda Lindberg, Vice President and Head of Commercial Management for Ericsson Market Area South East Asia, Oceania and India, said the strategy behind using coaching culture to help line managers navigate the pandemic and support their employees was an attempt to “take leadership development to a more sustainable context.”

Ericsson performed a pulse survey in the spring to find out how everyone was holding up under the stress and strain of virtual work, Lindberg said. “The results showed that stress levels were up across the board,” she said. “We knew at that point that coaching skills would help them slow down, tune into someone else’s concerns while still allowing them the time to engage in some self-care.”

Although the goal of the coaching culture program was clear, the method for delivering the training was not going to be a challenge. Lindberg said that as a telecommunications company that was performing heroic work to keep people connected during the pandemic, Ericsson employees were very comfortable adapting to virtual technology. That meant they were equally comfortable working or learning in a virtual environment, she added.

“Digital investment has always been part of our DNA,” said Anand. “It’s always top-of-mind in our planning, and we’re always looking at ways of building our digital capacity. So, people adjusted to the virtual nature of the learning opportunities.”

More than 450 of the line managers attended a series of virtual “teaser” sessions. Then, the managers were asked to sign up for a series of intensive sessions on coaching culture and skills. Nearly three quarters of those who attended the teasers ultimately chose to participate in the program. 

As well, participants were encouraged to participate in “coaching clubs” where they could practice their coach conversations. “Learning theories is okay but you really need to dive in and do it and put it into practice before it becomes part of you,” said Lindberg. “Those coaching clubs created a stickiness around the training. It helped us develop those internal muscles around coaching skills.” 

The initial results from the program were impressive. A strong majority of the participants ranked their group coaching skills sessions very highly, Lindberg said. And seven in 10 participants reported that their performance had improved as a result of being involved in the program.

Ultimately, the coaching skills program served two major goals for Ericsson, Lindberg said. It provided line managers with the tools and mindset necessary to deal with the current virtual work environment. However, there were other, longer-term benefits as well.

“We have always talked about the importance of accountability in our leaders,” Lindberg said. “The best way to enable accountability is through coaching skills. When your leaders realize they are being accountable, it triggers some pride. It allows them all to own their results. And it allows them to grow as leaders and build bench strength for the company. It’s literally a culture where leaders are building other leaders, grooming and preparing them for future roles.”

Kevin Ackermann, Director, Client Solutions, LHH

Source: lhh.com

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Building Skills to Renew an Existing Workforce

Building Skills to Renew an Existing Workforce

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Like many businesses, Microsoft Australia is preparing its workforce with the skills of tomorrow as the company ponders the challenges ahead in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. What is different is the path they are taking to renewing the existing workforce rather than replacing them.

The changes wrought by the coronavirus have included a speeding up of the digital transformation trend, placing demands for new skills on companies in every sector and affecting even a technology giant like Microsoft.

“This is a dramatic escalation of digital transformation and the demand has been significant,” the firm’s local human resources director, Ingrid Jenkins, says.

“Our customers are accelerating their digital transformation. They are looking to us as a partner in bringing that technology acumen and expertise into the conversations. So we have a definite focus around technology skills.”

But rather than hiring in new staff and making redundant those staff whose skills are no longer needed, the company is reskilling and upskilling its existing staff.

The company is boosting its workforce’s skills in cloud technology, data analytics and artificial intelligence, and cyber security – all central elements of a move to increased digitisation.

“What our customers are asking is that depth of technical acumen,” Jenkins says.

But technology “will only get you so far”, and the company is also placing a focus on analytical thinking, problem solving, creativity and consulting skills.

“It’s actually about deeply understanding your customers and industry enough to make that technology relevant,” she says. “Using the power of technology to help customers and industries with their business challenges or opportunities requires our teams to have that deep industry knowledge. So we’ve got a big focus around industry acumen.”

Jenkins says technology is moving so quickly that Microsoft couldn’t keep up simply by hiring new staff with the new skills, even if it wanted to.

Instead, each member of staff has a mandatory learning program designed specifically for their role to help them meet what will be the core requirements of that role for the future.

In addition to the core requirements training, staff have the option of taking on additional training which will help them grow into new roles. The company provides a day a month for workers to dedicate to their learning.

“Our people absolutely appreciate just how much investment there is in their skilling and keeping their skills up-to-date and relevant. They get our industry. They get how quickly things evolve and change and how they have to come up to speed,” Jenkins says.

Ultimately, she says, renewing talent rather than replacing it is a smarter business decision which can help to foster a better team culture overall.

digital transformation

James Mcilvena, the Australian managing director of workforce transformation and development organisation LHH says there simply aren’t enough qualified people in the workforce to meet demand for the skills that will help organisations grow in the future.

“Organisations need these future roles and they’re going to need to grow rather than hire when it comes to these roles,” Mcilvena says.

“It’s a smart investment of their money. If you think about the cost of taking an individual who already has the institutional knowledge from working with your organisation for 10 years, you can actually reskill and retrain that person for a lower cost than paying a redundancy and then a recruitment fee to bring a new person in.”

There are two different but related approaches, he says.

Upskilling is where staff have a significant component of the skills already needed to carry out a future-proofed job and are learning to supplement their existing skills.

“Reskilling is taking a role that might not exist in two years and saying we’re going to set you on a completely new path,” explains Mcilvena. “You might go from being a customer service rep to becoming a data analyst, a complete 180 when it comes to reskilling.”

The first step to equipping a workforce with the skills needed for the company’s future is to get a full understanding of where the company is headed and the challenges it might face, and to consider the roles that might be displaced or affected by the changes, and the new roles that will be created.

Companies then need to assess the staff to target where their investment can be maximised. If someone doesn’t have a head for figures or basic mathematical ability, trying to reskill them into a data analytics role, for instance, would be a waste of time and money.

Secondly, if companies want to get a good return on their investment in retraining, they need to spend the money on staff who are keen and open to learning new skills. Those who want to evolve with the business.

Finally, redeploying talent into the right roles is essential. “There is no point making products you can’t sell, and the same logic applies here,” Mcilvena says. “Once you have invested in your talent, you need to ensure they are placed and supported in the roles that will drive business outcomes and prosperity for the long term. If you don’t get this right, you can’t protect your investment. It takes a dedicated approach, not an internal job board.”

For the company, the financials of getting this right are just responsible business management. This is before considering there is also a pay off in terms of increased employee engagement and a stronger employer brand, says Mcilvena.

“The overwhelming response from employees is the positivity in feeling rather than outcomes being dictated to them they have more control of their own destiny,” he says.

To learn more about developing a renewable workforce, visit https://lhh.com.vn/the-new-roi/

Source: afr.com

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How to Emphasize Soft Skills in Your Personal Branding

How to Emphasize Soft Skills in Your Personal Branding

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How to Emphasize Soft Skills in Your Personal Branding

Those who have strong soft skills are usually great listeners, persuaders, and collaborators. They make the workplace easier for others.

For decades, there’s been a strong emphasis on technical or hard skills in the workplace. Hiring managers picked people based predominantly on their work experience or training. 

However, employers have realized that work experience alone isn’t enough to create a productive and engaging workplace.

“People get hired because of their hard skills but get fired because of their [lack of] soft skills,” said Irish management consultant Bruce Tulgan.

This situation forced employers to reconsider what they look for when hiring. Now, they’re not just looking for hard skills. They’re demanding soft skills like never before.

The Rising Demand for Soft Skills

Today, soft skills are needed more than ever. Soft skills are interpersonal or people skills. Those who have it are usually great listeners, persuaders, and collaborators. They make the workplace easier for others.

Employers are searching everywhere to hire these people, but they’re not having a lot of success.

In 2015, The Wall Street Journal surveyed 900 executives and discovered that 92% of them thought soft skills were just as or more important than hard skills. However, 89% of them had trouble hiring people who had these skills. 

The next year, LinkedIn surveyed 281 hiring managers. About 58% of the managers said that the lack of soft skills in job candidates had limited their company’s productivity.

LinkedIn discovered that these were the skills managers were looking for:

  • The ability to communicate
  • Organization
  • Capacity for teamwork
  • Punctuality
  • Critical thinking
  • Social savvy
  • Creativity
  • Adaptability

If you excel at any of the skills listed above, pat yourself on the back because you’re a unicorn. Not only are you great at completing tasks, you know how to be a team player.

Someone like you is in high-demand. You should take advantage of your scarcity by emphasizing it in your personal branding. 

When you’re known for your soft skills, you have to worry less about chasing after employers because they’ll start coming to you.

How to Show Off Your Soft Skills in Your Personal Branding

Use your resume, cover letter, and LinkedIn profile to show that you have great soft skills. Write compelling examples of behaviors and results that quantify your intangible skills.

Too often, soft skills are awkwardly woven into a job seeker’s summary (“Multi-tasking team player who consistently demonstrates adaptability, leadership, open-mindedness, and positivity”) and then it’s left for the reader to determine the validity of the claims.

Beneath each job listing, include bullets that illustrate your accomplishments (three to six bullets for your most recent job; one to three for older positions). 

Use the SOAR model (situation, obstacle, action, and results) to tell the story concisely and completely. For example, if you’ve said you’re “adaptable,” include an event where you spearheaded change or successfully adapted to a new process or format.

Instead of merely saying you’re a “team player,” include an example of a time when you relied on your interpersonal and communication skills to gain consensus.

Overused, worn-out words tend to become meaningless, leaving you undifferentiated from everyone else vying for a position. Soft skills can give you a competitive advantage, but it’s up to you to make the intangible tangible.

Conclusion 

The demand for soft skills is high but the supply is low. If you’re great at working with others and making them feel at ease, you should express this to potential employers.

You can do this by crafting your unique knowledge and experience into your personal branding. Highlight in your resume, cover letter, and LinkedIn profile the soft skills you demonstrate effectively and consistently in your role.

However, remember to give qualitative examples. Vague terms will only confuse employers. Use numbers, time, percentages, and detailed examples to show that you can drive results.

Soft skills are your competitive advantage. Be proud of them!

Source: lhh.com

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Reinventing Today’s Workforce: Welcome to the Skills Economy

Reinventing Today’s Workforce: Welcome to the Skills Economy

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Reinventing Today’s Workforce Welcome to the Skills Economy

“We are definitely seeing that the knowledge economy is becoming the skills economy,” said Michael Priddis, CEO of Faethm, who shares the opportunities for companies that adopt a data-enabled and human-first approach to workforce transformation, in response to automation, COVID and recession, to rapidly upskill and reskill their workforces to transition to the jobs of tomorrow.

Ranjit de Sousa, President, LHH

After several years of diving deep into the future workforce needs of successful companies, Mike Priddis, CEO of Faethm, has come to a bold conclusion.

The “knowledge economy” is dead. Long live the “skills economy.”

“We are definitely seeing that the knowledge economy is becoming the skills economy,” said Priddis, whose company uses AI to predict the impact of forces such as automation, robotics, and the pandemic on current and future jobs. 

“Today, knowledge and access to knowledge is easy. Google is on any device we’ve got. Applying that knowledge is different. We are entering a period where learning skills will be critical.”

Priddis said many business organizations are struggling to embrace this rapid transition from knowledge to skills-based economies. That is, he said, due in part to the fact that economic disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the pace and magnitude of all forms of transformation.

Priddis calls this “the slingshot to 2023” what once used to take years to design, plan and put into action must now be brought to fruition in a matter of months.

“Prior to January of this year, most organizations were preparing for a transformation of some sort. Now, the pace of transformation has accelerated at an alarming pace to ensure that companies survive. We call that the slingshot effect.”

Unfortunately, Priddis said, current approaches to education and workforce management do not match up well with the slingshot phenomenon. Most post-secondary institutions still focus heavily on traditional approaches to education, where knowledge is acquired over a period of years in an academic vacuum but never applied in the real world. Employers, meanwhile, remain wedded to buying talent or hiring people with new skills, rather than reskilling existing workers to meet new business demands.

“The best boss I ever had said ‘the half-life of learning is 30 minutes unless you get to apply it,’” Priddis said. “What that implies is that we need to have action-based learning, taking place in context. We need to be giving people not just the information but a chance for people to practice that skill.”

If you apply those principles in a real-world example—like a company forced to transform to address the impact of a global pandemic—the emphasis very quickly shifts to identifying those jobs that are vulnerable to automation, or cannot be performed effectively in a remote environment and those that have longer-term future viability.

Priddis said Faethm works with clients to analyze the impact of external trends on current workforces and the skills required to be future-ready. This analysis is predictive, he said, identifying portions of jobs that might be replaced by technology (automation), jobs that might evolve with technology (augmentation) and the new and emerging jobs that will need to be filled to support deployment of these technologies (addition).

This analysis should help companies to not only meet future skills needs but identify people within an existing workforce that can transition from vulnerable to emerging roles.

“Our biggest contribution has been to show companies that the people they are going to need in the future, they already have,” Priddis said. “It’s a pretty simple equation. It’s cheaper to retrain and redeploy than to make redundant and rehire.”

Even though almost everyone wants to take a “humanistic approach,” where the well-being of individual employees is not sacrificed to a bottom-line objective, not every organization can see the value in retraining and redeploying, Priddis said.

“We all want to do right by people,” Priddis said. “But most companies also know that it’s the lens of dollars and cents that drives decisions at the executive table. The problem is that if everybody sheds staff, they don’t need with no thought about what they’re going to do next, it creates chaos.”

Thankfully, Priddis said an increasing number of companies are starting to see that the humanistic approach may also be the most cost-effective approach.

That was certainly the experience with one Faethm client who was facing a pressing need to reduce its workforce of accountants. Few jobs have been more impacted than accountancy, Priddis said, which involves a range of skills that are easily performed by AI applications. However, a predictive analysis of other remaining and emerging jobs within the same organization revealed opportunities for the accountants to be retrained.

Specifically, Faethm was able to determine that an accountant’s skill set was very similar to that of a cyber security analyst—a high-demand job in organizations all over the world. 

“The only gap we could see was the specific cyber-security knowledge and that was a trainable gap,” Priddis said. “It didn’t make any sense for this company to shed their accounting staff, spending all that money on redundancy and then hiring new cyber security people. They could teach those accountants to be cyber analysts.”

Priddis said predictive analysis can function as a data-driven “GPS” that can help employers anticipate future workforce scenarios and inform decision making.

That means organizations need to acquire the capacity to transform their workforces in a more rapid and agile fashion as new and potentially seismic technologies arrive.

“It always struck me as slightly ambitious and perhaps slightly naïve to think that we are in a position to determine exactly where we’re transitioning to,” Priddis said. “I think most organizations, rather than trying to figure out where they are going, should be building capabilities to continuously experience these sorts of changes. The ability to change, and to have a dynamic workforce that can adjust as the context changes, is probably the single biggest muscle that organizations need to build.”

Source: lhh.com

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