675 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

Four factors lie at the heart of good, practical leadership development: making it experiential; influencing participants’ “being,” not just their “doing”; placing it into its wider, systemic context; and enrolling faculty who act less as experts and more as Sherpas.

Content: Article | Author: Deborah Rowland | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Leadership, Training & Development

We call this dynamic the “Growth Paradox:” Growth creates complexity and yet complexity is the number one killer of profitable growth. You cannot win on the outside, in the marketplace, if you are losing on the inside, with an organization stifled by its own growth.

Content: Quotation | Author: Chris Zook | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

We all know the basics of good presentation skills: don’t read from a script; don’t overwhelm your audience with verbose slides; and the like. But for a particular kind of high-stakes presentation — one in which you’re trying to get buy-in from key decision-makers — those basics aren’t enough.

To persuade the people who have the power to approve your idea or let it die, you … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Dorie Clark | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips

Investments in traditional leadership development are often misguided and a waste of money. It’s not that development itself isn’t important. But there’s little evidence that much of it works. I’ll share some findings from a study my colleagues and I just completed at Deloitte. We surveyed and interviewed executives from more than 2,000 companies, asking extensive questions about how they develop leaders, how their companies … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Josh Bersin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

Managing your star performers should be no sweat, right? After all, they’re delivering results and exceeding targets. But don’t think you can just get out of their way and let them excel. They require just as much attention as everyone else. How do you manage someone who is knocking it out of the park? How do you keep stars excited about their work? And what … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Rebecca Knight | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Are companies overlooking the skilled people in their own workforce? Perhaps. We see three common scenarios that can cause employers to recruit outside their ranks for talented people (albeit at their own risk).

Content: Article | Author: Wade Burgess | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

How can companies get a better idea of which skills employees and job candidates have? While university degrees and grades have done that job for a long time, they’ve done it imperfectly. In today’s rapidly evolving knowledge economy, badges, nanodegrees, and certificates have aimed to bridge the gap – but also leave a lot to be desired. While HR departments are eager for better “people … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michelle Weise | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

At any given moment, about 5%–7% of companies either are in free fall or are about to be. Free fall is a crisis of obsolescence and decline that can happen at any point in a company’s life cycle, but most often it affects maturing incumbents whose business model has come under competitive attack from insurgents or is no longer viable in a changing market. And … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Chris Zook | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Breakthroughs may be worth pursuing, but most companies benefit more from incremental innovation efforts that add new forms of consumer value to their present products and services. The trick is to determine what elements to add in order to boost the perceived value of your offering. You don’t want to expend resources adding features that consumers don’t care about. While what constitutes “value” can be … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Eric Almquist | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation, Marketing / Sales

We don’t know much about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to reference checks. That’s because there’s very little research that’s been conducted on the practice. So how can we gain insight into what reference checks actually do? The company I work for, SkillSurvey, is in the business of facilitating checks online. To date, we have reference feedback on approximately 3.2 million job … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Cynthia A. Hedricks | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

In over 20 years of experience in prioritizing, selecting, and managing projects, Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez has developed a simple framework that he calls the “Hierarchy of Purpose.” It is a tool that executive teams can use to help them prioritize strategic initiatives and projects.

Content: Article | Author: Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Project Management, Strategy

The biggest hurdle to effective organizational change is people. A core part of your job as a leader is to help others overcome the inherent, very human bias toward maintaining the status quo. You first need to identify who — that is, which individuals and groups — have the biggest potential to thwart positive change. Then you have to unstick them. Doing so begins with … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Sally Blount | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

Successfully competing for top talent involves both selling jobs to the best candidates and retaining the highest performing incumbents. In order to be seen as an employer of choice with a compelling value proposition for employees, many companies measure turnover and conduct exit interviews with departing employees to gather feedback about the experiences people had working there and the reasons why they’re leaving. But a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Benjamin Dattner | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

You think you’ve found the right candidate to fill your open position and now it’s time to check references. What’s the best way to get the information you need? Should you ask each person the same questions? What do you read—if anything—into the tone of their voice? And how do you overcome the fact that so many companies only allow you to talk to HR … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Rebecca Knight | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

The number of priorities admitted to by an organization is revealing. It is notable that if the risk appetite of a senior executive team is very low (or if they are not able or inclined to make the tough choices), they will tend to have a generous portfolio of priorities; they don’t want to take the risk of not being compliant, missing a market opportunity, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Executive teams replete with functional experts (CFOs, CHROs, etc.) are so common today one forgets they were not always the norm. By some accounts, the average team size for large firms is now 10, double what it was 30 years ago. Although larger teams theoretically bring benefits, such as a diversity of perspectives, practical downsides have grown with team size. So what can a CEO … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jacques Neatby | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Management

We tend to hire people on the “hard” (IQ and experience) but fire them for their failure to master the “soft.” References are one of the best ways to assess the latter.

Content: Quotation | Author: Claudio Fernández-Aráoz | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

We analyzed data describing the behavior of 3,492 participants in a development program designed to help managers become better coaches. As part of this program, their coaching skills were assessed by others in 360-degree assessments. We identified those who were perceived as being the most effective listeners (the top 5%). We then compared the best listeners to the average of all other people in the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jack Zenger | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

There is a lot of hype surrounding data and analytics. Firms are constantly exhorted to set strategies in place to collect and analyze big data, and warned about the potential negative consequences of not doing so. In this article we explore why. Based on our work with companies that are trying to find concrete and usable insights from petabytes of data, we have identified four … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Anja Lambrecht | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Management

Leaders want to get better in the here-and-now, not to be judged against a competency map or be sold an abstract theory about what leadership should look like. If you want to become a great leader, become a student of your context — understand your organization’s social system — and mind your routines. Leadership development is more about application than theory.

Content: Quotation | Author: Todd Warner | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Leadership, Personal Development, Training & Development