It is very rare to find a truly captivating presenter. It is very easy to come across cringe-inducing ones though.
How should you design a good presentation? How can you get your message across? How can you develop power, presence and confidence when public speaking?
Watch this excellent talk by Garr Reynolds (author of PresentationZen). It is 60 minutes long but the time will fly by, as any engaging presentation should.
I read two articles this morning that confirmed a few thoughts in my mind:
Read on and see if you agree with my analysis.
… Continue Reading
I recently was sent this summary of some research into employee engagement. It’s worth the quick read.
When employees are highly engaged, their companies enjoy 26% higher employee productivity, have lower turnover risk, and are more likely to attract top talent, according to a report by Watson Wyatt, a consulting firm.
The survey found the following about highly engaged employees
- They are twice as likely as their less engaged peers to be top performers.
- They miss 20% fewer days of work.
- Just about 75% of them exceed or far exceed expectations in their most recent performance review.
- They tend to be more supportive of organizational change initiatives and resilient in the face of change.
“There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to employee engagement,” said Ilene Gochman, global practice leader for organization effectiveness at the firm. “Segmenting the workforce and tailoring communication, performance management programs and other resources to specific employee groups is the most effective way to engage workers.”
Companies that survive and thrive during the recession will be those that continue to develop deep and meaningful connections with their staff and customers. We are witnessing a knee jerk reaction from many companies who rather focus on costs and price. We’d recommend companies concentrate their energies more broadly than this. These are difficult and unprecedented times where bold new approaches are required. I’m reading and excellent paper on The Importance of the Customer Experience in a Down Economy written but Customer Futures. The paper offers expert insights, observations and advice and when looked at as a whole reveal five seminal themes that will help business leaders succeed in these difficult times:
• What customers are experiencing, why it matters and what to
do about it
• Leadership and strategy in troubled times
• Economics that justify a customer-focused strategy
• Delivering more with less
• Employees: stressed but so essential
I highly recommend psychologist Barry Schwartz’s recent presentation at the TED 2009 conference. It is a 20 minute talk on how our bureaucracy-obsessed society should nurture practical wisdom.
He discusses how when things go wrong, we scramble for two tools – better incentives and more rules.
He says rules and standardized processes and procedures are insurance policies against disaster and they are often successful in preventing it. But, while rules can be useful, they are not enough. The more rules you have, the less practical wisdom you will have. The reality is that real world problems are ambiguous and rigid rules can remove opportunities for improvisation and prevent people from inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and people at hand. Rules are often implemented at the cost of initiative, creativity and passion – yet these are vital to organizational success. Rigid rules can perpetuate mediocrity because ‘that’s just the way things are done around here’. People start saying things like ‘Don’t look at me – I just work here’.
I can personally relate to what Schwartz is saying. After the Enron, Worldcom debacle, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed. This act was great for accounting firms because it provided them with a conveyer belt of guaranteed, hefty income. Part of the act required management to test, document and then assess the adequacy of their internal controls/rules over financial reporting. While this legislation may have produced fewer future Enrons, it injected despondency, endless monotony and career doubts into most staff members and auditors (including me) who had to test, document or audit a company’s controls/rules. I saw how it drained people of qualities such as vitality and ingenuity – the very qualities that make us human.
I wonder what regulations will be passed after the current financial crisis. In interviews on the topic of practical wisdom, Schwartz has highlighted how business was about doing what was profitable and legal. Now it is important to do what is profitable and right. How do you nurture in people the desire to do the right thing? How do you give them the tools so that they’ll know what the right thing is? How do you implement rules but also leave room for creative improvisation and personal judgment?
It is no longer ‘cool’ to say your company’s mission is to make money and maximize shareholder wealth. Although many companies pretend that they have a more noble purpose, their actions, processes, controls, hierarchy, behaviour of management and treatment of their employees reveals that maximizing returns is actually still their number 1 priority.
In his recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Gary Hamel passionately believes that any company, whose primary mission is to make money and enhance the bottom line, is misunderstanding the role and responsibility of business in the 21st century.
Hamel says:
Most companies strive to maximize shareholder wealth—a goal that is inadequate in many respects. As an emotional catalyst, wealth maximization lacks the power to fully mobilize human energies. It’s an insufficient defense when people question the legitimacy of corporate power. And it’s not specific or compelling enough to spur renewal. For these reasons, tomorrow’s management practices must focus on the achievement of socially significant and noble goals.
Many companies have jumped on the social responsibility bandwagon and attached green, sustainability statements to their mission. They monitor their carbon footprint and make a fuss of donations and good deeds for charities. That is a good start but it is not enough. Companies need to embed citizenship and community into the fabric of their vision. What is your company’s mission aside from making money? How do you make a difference to the customers you serve? My husband works at a global professional services firm and does not know what their vision is aside from making cash. That is probably one of the main reasons why they struggle to differentiate and manage talent.
Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, Google, Disney and Amazon have a vision beyond making money and their employees can articulate it. These employees feel as if they are making a difference – they know they are more than robotic cogs in a vast money making machine. That is why these companies are often used as case studies for customer and employee engagement. If banks had a socially responsible vision beyond making money, we probably would not be in the pickle we currently find ourselves.
We put so much pressure on politicians to solve community problems but often forget that corporations have an inherent advantage over elected public servants. CEOs and their companies have a capacity to do good that often outweighs that of national politicians.
A lot is written about how to attract and retain talented young staff. And, right now, in the midst of a global recession, even more is being written about how to get them engaged and passionate about what they are doing. But a recent survey from CEB (the Corporate Executive Board) reminds us not to think that older, top level staff are settled, focused and sticking around.
“Most companies think that in the downturn employees, especially senior leaders, are just grateful to have a job,” says Jean Martin, executive director of the CEB’s Corporate Leadership Council. In fact, valued players are increasingly likely to be looking around. Among high-potential employees (identified as such by their employers) one out of four plans on quitting in the next 12 months. The best way to motivate the top group? Money. They are Baby Boomers after all. Read more about what TomorrowToday has to say on generations in the financial crisis.
The CEB survey shows that employee engagement is falling faster among top executives than any other group. Only 13% of senior executives at the vice-presidential level or higher say they are “willing to go above and beyond what is expected of them”—a decline from 29% two years ago. In the December 2008 survey of the CEB’s 79,000 member employees worldwide at 123 organizations, 20% of all respondents said they were disengaged – that was only 10% two years ago.
CEB says compensation-based incentives are three times as likely to improve engagement among senior executives as among the workforce as a whole. To keep high-potential employees from defecting, companies should be investing in rewarding them and have a rigorous performance-management process in place to ensure a genuine meritocracy.
Cali Yost, author of Work+Life, and Fast Company blogger, contends that “using strategic work+life flexibility can help organizations avoid at least some layoffs. Reduced schedules, sabbaticals, telecommuting and flexible scheduling are not just isolated, downsizing tactics. They are part of a broad, coordinated growth and cost-cutting business strategy with multiple benefits that include, but are not limited to, creative downsizing.” A study of 100 Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) co-sponsored by her company reveals that CFOs are using strategic flexibility to reduce their workforce without severing ties with employees.
According to Yost, “…nearly one third of CFOs used flexibility as a workforce reduction strategy, allowing them to stay connected to employees through contract project-based work, reduced hours with full-benefits and sabbaticals with full benefits.”
Yost urges employers to consider working flexibly before considering layoffs. She shares an example of a company that found a creative way to deal with dwindling budgets and minimize employee suffering. In 2008, Sigma, a full-service advertising agency in New Jersey, asked its employees to consider part-time hours or monthly sabbaticals as a way to avoid layoffs. “When given the choice, Sigma found employees were more than willing to take time and a reduction in pay, rather than leave the company,” said Yost.
These are tough times. None of us wants to take a pay cut. But earning less may be better than earning nothing.
Extracted from original at Business Lexington website.
I am a student of economic history, and love seeing the patterns that a study of history reveals.
Amadeo Peter Gianini was born in 1870 in California, the son of Italian immigrants. His first occupation was as a produce dealer for farms in the Santa Clara Valley of California. He found established banks unwilling to take on his or the farmers business. When his father-in-law died, he was persuaded to take his place on the Board of a small bank. His intention was to influence banking from the inside, but after many rows and ructions, he found it impossible to persuade his fellow bankers to change their practices.
He left, and in 1906, founded a small bank, “The Bank of Italy”. His express intention was to lend money to small businesses and the emerging middle class. Up to that time, they had had no access to banking. On April 18, 1906, San Francisco was devastated by an earthquake and fires. His bank building collapsed, but because of his personal intervention that previous night, he still had all of his bank records. Other banks’ records were destroyed, and their bank vaults to hot to open, and they were not lending.
The next morning, Amadeo went to the harbour, and ran his bank from the side of a wharf. Giving every cent of his $ 87,000 capital in loans to small businesses aiming to rebuild the city. He encouraged ships to go north and buy lumber and bring it back to North Beach, for example. Hundreds of people, who had been hoarding their money, saw his skill and confidence, and invested their money with him. This gave him more capital to continue lending. North Beach was rebuilt faster than any other part of the city. And every single one of these loans was later repaid!
This video clip is a news report from 1981. It covers the once “far fetched” concept of reading news on your home computer. It is amazing to see how far we have come! My favourite part of the clip is where a man is interviewed because he is one of the rare few that owns a home computer.
A few weeks ago, I was discussing changes in the workplace with a member of my team, Julie Surycz. She went away and wrote this:
In 1943, the Chairman of IBM, Thomas Watson said, ‘I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers.’
Thomas Watson was wrong. He wouldn’t recognize the world as it is today. Trade liberalization, globalization, advances in technology, the power of the Web, the rise of Asian competitors and more – the world has fundamentally changed since 1943. The strange thing is that the way in which we work has not kept pace. We generally still work in outdated traditional, hierarchical management structures that were designed for the mass-producing, industrialized 19th/20th century and not the flat, hyper connected 21st one.
But things are starting to change. We have reached the point where, unless we embrace a new world of work, business will not reap the competitive advantage, significant financial rewards and efficiency that management, employees, suppliers, customers and shareholders desire.
I have just been forwarded an email from a friend who works at a reputable, global company. This company is widely quoted as saying that talent management is a priority and people are their greatest asset.
The email was sent by HR to all managers within a department and was informing them of their new promotion practices. This is a sentence from the email:
‘Our approach to considering candidates will still be peer group coach meetings to grade, box and rank all of those that wish to be considered for promotion.’
Grade, box and rank? How does this make highly qualified, super talented and ambitious employees feel? My eggs, minced beef and chicken drumsticks in the fridge are graded, boxed and ranked.
Companies must be so careful to practice what they preach. If I were to be graded, boxed and ranked, I would not feel like a valued, appreciated human being. In fact, I wouldn’t really bother about being promoted anymore – I would look to leave. I think this company’s talent management strategy needs some fine-tuning.
Here’s an interesting piece of information:
According to the UK 2009 Best Companies to Work For survey only 37% of employees in three-star accredited companies – the top award for engagement – are worried about the impact of the current economic climate on their organisation’s future. The proportion grows to two-thirds of staff in companies that did not achieve the accreditation and over half in firms with one star.
Jonathan Austin, chief executive of Best Companies, said: “Those employees who feel involved and committed to their organisation feel more confident about their organisation’s future in these uncertain times – putting their companies in the best position to survive the recession.”
Of the 795 organisations that applied for UK Best Companies accreditation this year, 639 made the grade. Three-star status was given to 55 firms – including Nando’s, Pannone LLP and Office Angels.
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