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2 Questions that Are Vital If You Want to Be a Better Leader

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Being a leader is a great privilege that brings with it great responsibility. As a leader, you are often the first to receive the credit and almost always the first to receive the blame. Your position is both demanding and rewarding and requires great skill and balance. You are expected to build authentic relationships, maintain confidentiality, develop your team and meet your goals. Your communication must be strong, and your time management must be masterful.  You need to effectively delegate, problem solve, strategise, manage conflict and prioritise. People expect you to be engaging but serious, charismatic but sincere, confident but humble, and transparent but discreet. It is one of the most challenging and rewarding positions you can have, and it is replete with great joys and deep challenges.

The few leaders who are lucky enough to receive training on how to be a leader often attend a one-time seminar or class that focuses heavily on skill acquisition. This is a good place to start but an insufficient one to begin and end. The development of leadership skills is most certainly necessary to become a strong leader, but it is hardly a one-shot deal. Mastering the skills required of leadership is a lifelong endeavour and should be treated as such with consistent training, application, support and coaching. Further, honing these skills is just one of the components of becoming a strong leader. The other component is comprised of mindset, desire and investment required of a leader. Without a leader’s mindset, skill mastery becomes largely irrelevant. Being a leader requires the mindset of a leader.

In 2017, after nearly a decade spent building Uber into a household brand, Travis Kalanick yielded to pressure from investors who demanded that he step down as CEO. Shortly before offering his resignation, the scandal-plagued founder issued a statement: “For the first time I’ve been willing to admit that I need leadership help.”

That was too little too late. And for such once-great commercial giants as Kodak, Blockbuster, and Blackberry, the unwillingness to solicit advice or consider potential pitfalls resulted in not only personal but corporate catastrophe.

Two thousand years ago, two great academies of study debated the ancient laws of the Judean commonwealth. History records that the scholars of the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai argued with one another so passionately it was as if “they fought with swords and spears.” Each school had its own angle on higher truth, and each was committed to preserving the integrity of Jewish legal tradition.

But when they left the study hall, they were fast friends. They married their sons and daughters to each other. Their different visions never became personal. And, occasionally, one school convinced the other that it was wrong.

Ultimately, it was the opinions of the House of Hillel that prevailed, and later authorities explain why. Not only did the scholars of Hillel always record the opinions held by the scholars of Shammai along with their own—they always recorded the opposition opinions first.

Only when we understand the other side of any argument can we truly understand our own. That’s why intellectual integrity demands that we ask ourselves these two questions:

  • If I don’t understand why you believe what you believe, how can I be sure that you’re wrong?
  • If I don’t understand why you might reasonably disagree with me, how can I be sure that I’m right?

It’s important to note that leadership is not management. And the satisfaction you derive from being a leader has nothing to do with monetary bonuses and everything to do with purpose.

Why do you want to become a leader?

If you lack purpose or drive, there’s no reason for you to become a leader. You might as well do something else. Because at its core, leadership requires sacrifice, and if you don’t have a strong sense of purpose and an unfailable drive, none of the things you sacrifice will mean anything.

Without these two quintessential characteristics, you’ll come to resent the role as well as the people that you lead. For those who have a strong sense of purpose, they are more than willing to go the extra mile — to go out on a limb for those we lead. It’s an inexplicable feeling, but all great leaders have it.

Many people realise that they’re not leadership material. And that is ok, don’t let anyone judge you because that’s indicative of great self-awareness. It’s also one less person who will potentially take a leadership position to use it for selfish gain.

As a leader, when you encourage underlings to propose new ideas, challenge conventional thinking, and argue against the status quo, you are not promoting insurrection. Just the opposite. You are forging a culture of creativity, mutual respect, and intellectual integrity, one in which every contribution is valued and where a commitment to sound decision-making overrides investment in ego or personal prestige. And that will drive you and your organization relentlessly toward success, not occasionally, but always.

Given our current situation knowing that your colleagues or employees are best suited for this new scenario we find ourselves in. Finding the right talent, the best fit for the job and your organisation can be a very challenging task. It is now important to find out whether your managers or your team is well-equipped of working together from various locations. It requires deep knowledge of their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, interests, work style and other characteristics. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you, helping you discover if your people are resilient during times of hardship, if they are autonomous, if they are team players, without actual human contact. Given that our platform is cloud-based, everyone can use it from home as well. Humanity finds itself at a crossroad for various reasons now, why not help people discover and develop themselves from the comfort of their own homes?

Request a free demo:

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Sources:

https://www.bngteam.com/blog/top-4-leadership-questions-ask-every-day/
https://letsgrowleaders.com/2019/11/07/7-questions-to-ask-yourself-to-be-a-better-leader/
https://www.coburgbanks.co.uk/blog/assessing-applicants/21-tough-interview-questions-that-reveal-true-leadership-potential/

Overcoming the Recruitment Biases

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Do you or anyone you know have a sixth sense when it comes to recruitment? Is that “sense” completely unbiased and effective? If you answered “yes”, then you are definitely lying to yourselves.

While it is, indeed, true that some people have much more success in recruitment then others,  this happens, most of the times, due to their abilities slowly developed over the course of time and multiple errors.

How do you make up your mind when confronted with a decision? Well, people tend to prefer one of the two following approaches:

One of these approaches is using the “gut feeling”, that has been proven to be successful for them over the years. The main problem with this approach is that it can never be reliable enough. No matter how many times it helped you make the right decision, it will still be just a game of dice next time you use it. And, on top of that, have you ever considered what exactly is this gut feeling and how does it work? Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group, defined it as “the subconscious integration of all experiences, conditioning, and knowledge of a lifetime, including the cultural and emotional biases of that lifetime.” This doesn’t sound very professional when it comes to recruitment, does it?

The second approach that people use when facing a decision is what they imagine to be the rational analysis. This approach consists of trying to methodically examine all the available information and data in order to reach a conclusion. This may sound as unbiased as it can get, but is it?

In most cases, even while HR managers and CEOs adopt and implement programs that they believe to be free of bias, they still fall short of addressing unconscious biases. Dr. Banaji, a social psychologist at Harvard University, explains that “discrimination is veiled, not explicit, but rather more implicit, unconscious, because we ourselves are unaware of it”.

In his book, Everyday Bias, noted diversity consultant Howard J. Ross points to many studies indicating that these sorts of blindspots are ubiquitous in our lives.  “Virtually every important decision we make in life is influenced by these biases, and the more they remain in the unconscious, the less likely we are to make the best decisions we are able to make.”

Some of these biases include:

Confirmation bias: The tendency for people to seek out information that conforms to their preexisting views, and ignore information that goes against their views. For example, when an interviewer forms a distinct opinion about a candidate based on a minute piece of information such as the college they attended, before the actual interview, he or she is succumbing to confirmation bias. Great candidates may not make it to the interview or be perceived as less competent than others because of these assumptions. Organizations may decrease their chances of hiring great candidates due to interviewing confirmation bias.

Ingroup bias: The tendency to favor members of your own group (or those that you have more in common with). This bias can result in making poor hiring decisions by choosing a candidate entirely based on subjective criteria such as shared interests, hobbies, education, age, professional background or even similarities of appearance or name.

Selective perception: The process of cherry picking the information that we do like to perceive, while ignoring the ones that would contradict our beliefs. This goes hand in hand with the ingroup bias. When we find a candidate that matches our initial preferences, we tend to notice only his or hers positive features, while unconsciously filtering out all the data that would contravene our viewpoint.

Status quo bias: The fact that we would almost every time prefer the familiar things – the ones that we are already comfortable with. This bias prevents diverse hiring by making us prone to selecting the same type of employees that we have chosen in the past.

All of these could interfere with our reasoning, so what can we do in order to overcome all of these biases and use an objective judgment when recruiting candidates?

Anonymizing candidate selection is definitely helpful, but it’s far from enough. Consider using one of these methods to ensure that your organization’s hiring process is bias-free:

One way would be what Dan Hill, an internationally recognized expert on reading emotions based on facial micro expressions and the CEO of Sensory Logic, told us about at the Great People Inside Conference: The New World of Work in Romania (you can see the whole video by clicking here). “People don’t think their feelings; they feel them. So at Sensory Logic we bypass self-reported, cognitively filtered input by going straight to how people most naturally reflect and communicate their emotions: the face.”

For 16 years now, they’ve been both the pioneer and the most careful commercial  practitioner of applying facial coding as a research tool to help clients lower risks and optimize marketing, products and other business solutions. Facial coding enables them to scientifically yet non-invasively capture, quantify and analyze the emotions shown.

Another great way to make the best decisions would be to use exclusively the assessment systems in order to narrow down the number of possible candidates to only a few before you involve any human judgment. Afterwards, you can make the final decision by consulting with the HR managers that you trust the most.

Great People Inside provides easy-to-use tools and processes to attract, assess, match, select, onboard, manage, develop, benchmark and maintain workforces anywhere in the world.

Finding the right talent, the best fit for the job and your organisation, can be a very challenging task. It requires deep knowledge of your own organisation’s culture and keen understanding of the candidate’s personality, strengths, interests, work style and other characteristics. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you, helping you find employees who can flourish and reach the highest performance required to constantly bring your company forward.

Request a free demo:

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Sources:

Mlodinow, L., “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior”

www.wepow.com

www.forbes.com

www.sensorylogic.com/

 

Wellness programs: an integral part of employee wellbeing

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In October 2016, a survey of 3,100 people conducted by CareerBuilder discovered that a high percentage of employees take sick leave due to the fact they are stressed out and sleep-deprived, not because they have fallen ill. This is an increasingly worrying issue.

Nowadays, employees find it difficult to maintain a healthy work-life balance and manage their stress levels, even after their office hours. At the same time, employers are dealing with this issue poorly because they are implying the employee is the one in the wrong. Some employers go to extreme lengths such as regularly checking their employees’ social media profiles in order to try and catch them in the act.

As mentioned above, workplace stress is a growing and troublesome issue, thus managers are recommended to look into various wellness ideas and programs in order to keep their staff healthy and productive.

First of all, you as a manager must gather all the available data on the current situation at the office. Surveys are a good tool to get a feeling on how your employees are feeling about their workload, satisfaction and engagement levels, and also what is bothering them. Transparency within the workplace is something very sought out and encouraged. Employees wish to be heard; therefore open communication should be an integral part of your organisational culture.

When your employees are regularly struggling to meet their deadlines and they have to deal with a lot of stress, their wellbeing will suffer tremendously, and they will eventually start losing sleep and falling ill.

Nowadays, technology plays a huge role in almost every aspect of our lives. Inevitably, we now have apps that help us develop a healthier lifestyle and diet. Given the attention employee health is receiving from HR departments these days, employees all around the world are encouraged to get fit through wearable wellness.

ABI Research has discovered that, over the next 5 years, 13 million wearable devices are going to be used in corporate-wellness programs. The most popular devices are: Jawbone’s UP 24 activity tracker, Fitbits and Nike’s FuelBands. They are used to monitor people’s movements, eating and sleeping patterns. Thus, using it in a corporate environment, colleagues can motivate one another towards a healthier lifestyle, leading to significant drop in sick days, fewer health insurance premiums and also a steep rise in productivity.

This type of technology has come a long way, given the fact that users can now set their own alerts to be reminded to hydrate more or to get out of their chairs for some exercise. The device also allows employees to connect with one another, form teams and compete against each other.

TheSquareFoot has emerged as one of the best employers through their wellness program. The company provided all their employees with UP bands to show them how much they cared about their health and wellbeing. It is becoming a prominent trend for companies nowadays to integrate wearable devices into their health plan because it can be an attractive way of retaining talent.  This is what Aron Susman, co-founder of TheSquareFoot, had to say about the company’s wellness program: “It is a totally different type of investment than paying for a gym membership because it becomes a talking point in the office. It also shows you are willing to try new things and create a team over and beyond just professional responsibilities.”

Wellness Program Tips

If you’re still not convinced about corporate wellness programs, I am going to present you with some tips from none other than Alan Kohll, founder and CEO of TotalWellness. Alan is known for his work with employers in order to carry out plans for improving employee productivity and health. Next, I will present you some of his most important tips:

  1. Incorporate games into the team challenges. As stated earlier, colleagues can use their devices in order to create teams and work towards a universal goal. Besides the fact that it will boost motivation amongst employees to utilise the devices, the overall office morale will greatly increase. In his past experience, Kohll has seen a lot of impressive accomplishments, such as: 10,000 steps in a day or 5 million steps over the course of one month.
  2. For companies that have offices across the country, a good example of employees engagement through wellness would be the following: You have one office in New York and one in California. A fun challenge consists of the number of steps necessary to get from one office to another. Employees will engage and motivate one another in order to reach their goal of improving their overall wellbeing, thus creating a more productive work environment where each member of the team feels encouraged and supported.
  3. Company culture is something every employee resonates with. Bring wearable devices into that culture. One of the best features of these devices is that users can set reminders and be notified they have been inactive for the past few hours. When you make your employees feel good about taking a break for a walk outdoors, or inspire them to leave their desk for some push-ups or stretching, not only do you support the devices being used but also make your employees know that you care about their health.
  4. Probably the most important tip is saved for last. Don’t make participation mandatory. You have to understand that not everyone will be thrilled about the wellness program. Although it is imperative to make the wearables available to everyone, there will always be people who do not wish to partake in such activities, as Kohll himself states: “They can be great for individuals who are interested in making changes to their health behaviour but need that extra push, but they aren’t for everyone.”

All in all, there are countless ways to ensure that your employees maintain a high level of wellbeing and engagement. But, the thing is that no two companies are the same, and what works for one may not work for the other.

The Great People Inside employee assessment solutions and technology can be tailored to your company’s specific needs and organisational culture and can help you to boost the levels of job-fit and skill-use in your employees, generating job satisfaction, improved motivation, health and happiness, and boost employee retention.

Try out our assessment in order to measure the level of wellbeing in your organisation and find out the best approach to improve it.

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Laura Dragne is a dedicated PR enthusiast deeply committed to championing CSR initiatives and advocating for impactful social involvement. Her PR journey has instilled in her a profound belief that every interaction holds the potential to broaden one’s understanding of both oneself and the world. A proud graduate of Social Communication and Public Relations from the University of Bucharest, Romania, Laura seamlessly merges her academic knowledge with a heartfelt dedication to effecting positive change through purposeful communication strategies and community engagement.

Sources: Entrepreneur.com