To Find Creative Solutions, Look Outside Your Industry

Summary.   

The chaos and crises of the last two years have created all kinds of questions for leaders and organizations. One of the biggest questions is: Do we have new ideas about where to look for new ideas? When it comes to innovation and problem-solving, there will always be a place for old-fashioned, time-consuming R&D — research & development. Today, though, there is also a place for a different kind of R&D — rip off and duplicate. The fastest way for organizations to make sense of challenges they are seeing for the first time is to survey unrelated fields for ideas that have been working for a long time. Why gamble on untested strategies and insights if you can quickly apply strategies and insights that are already proven elsewhere? That’s how leaders can help their colleagues keep learning as fast as the world is changing.

A big challenge in times of disruption and uncertainty is for people and organizations to keep learning as fast as the world is changing — to analyze problems they haven’t encountered before, to make sense of opportunities they haven’t thought about before, to process emotions they haven’t experienced before.

That’s why leaders should encourage their colleagues to learn from experts in fields they haven’t worked in before. Practices that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another industry, especially when they challenge conventional wisdom in that industry. What better way to fuel your company’s imagination than to look for inspiration outside your field? If you want to learn fast, learn from strangers.

Complete Article at HBR

3 Strategies for Holding Yourself Accountable

Summary.   

As you progress in your career, it often gets harder to ask for help in reaching your goals and staying accountable to yourself to achieve them. If you’ve reached a career plateau, the author recommends three strategies to hold yourself accountable to your goals: 1) Enlist an accountability partner. 2) Go public in declaring and sharing goals. 3) Change your environment.

At the beginning of your career, you were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. You asked for help and soaked up the wisdom of your mentors and managers to climb the mountain. But once you experienced success, you found yourself scared to look down. After all, it’s intimidating at the top, when you think of everything you could lose. At this point asking for help begins to feel a lot less like a learning experience and a lot more like proof that you might not be cut out for the job at hand.

And the more successful you become, the less accountability you have. It’s not that you aren’t responsible to anyone; it’s that your goals become a lot more subjective: Lead the legal team, run the company, manage a department. So no matter the outcome, you can say, “Well, I tried my best.” At the same time, your calendar starts filling up with stuff you “have to do” as opposed to things you should be doing. So you find yourself in meetings you don’t fully believe add value and fighting tooth and nail to make time for tasks and projects that actually create impact.

Compelete Article at HBR

 

4 Ways Managers Can Increase Flexibility Without Losing Productivity

Summary.   

If employees want the benefits of flexibility, they’ll also need to shoulder some of the responsibility that goes with it, like autonomous problem-solving and providing and checking for updates. However, that doesn’t mean setting them adrift in the storm. Managers are still responsible for making sure everyone is rowing to the correct location in the same direction — even if they’re rowing at different times. To increase flexibility for employees without losing productivity — or sanity — managers will need to think differently about when employees work together, who works together, and how to share information and with whom, all while being careful to stay abreast of any changes and rapidly communicating changes in priorities.

The past two years have shown that employees desire greater flexibility — and they’re willing to change jobs to get it. Flexibility has tremendous benefits for employees, including reduced burnout and greater job satisfaction. However, it can also result in spiraling coordination costs for managers, untenable amounts of wasted effort, and the inability to respond quickly to client requests. The brief huddles that once allowed teams to promptly brainstorm solutions and align efforts are now harder to pull together. It can take days to get most members in the same virtual place at the same time (including one person who’s half-listening from the dentist’s chair).

To increase employee flexibility on their teams, managers need guidance and support — otherwise, they could burn out on the job or check out to find a new one. Here are four ways managers can offer their teams flexibility without breaking under the coordination costs or significantly stalling progress.

Rethink When Employees Work Together

For complex tasks that require teamwork, it’s not feasible to provide employees with complete flexibility (i.e., the ability to work for any duration at any time). However, returning to the standard in-office work week won’t work either. Thus, managers will need to think differently and deeply about project requirements and schedule accordingly.

Complete Article at HBR

 

The A to Z of testing before hiring

 

Before diving into the how and why of testing before hiring, it’s important to understand the objective behind it.

What’s the goal of testing before hiring? Many hiring managers view this as the magic bullet that is going to get them the perfect hire, while some view it as a necessary hurdle to closing positions.

However, mostly it is important to enhance the interview process and remove bias from it to hire the right fit. Because in an average interview many things are oversold including both experience and work accomplished, so testing can help us see though some of this fog, equip a trained interviewer to ask targeted questions and understand the responses much better, and remove bias from the hiring process.

In an exclusive webcast in association with Pearson, Yuri Roy, who heads Talent Acquisition at Tech Mahindra Business Services, shared insights into the A to Z of testing before hiring and why it becomes imperative in an interview process.

Defining the primary objective of testing before hiring

Before diving into the how and why of testing before hiring, it’s important to understand the objective behind it. Yuri shared that testing before hiring is a very individual activity-as an organization you need to decide what is the purpose the testing needs to serve. 

Complete Article at People matters