675 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

In our combined 50-plus years of working to improve organizations, we’ve observed that many managers struggle to make employees feel that their talents and contributions are noticed and valued. To explore this problem, we recently took a deep dive within an organization to see how organizational efforts to show appreciation and gratitude were perceived. In that project we engaged with both employees and managers through … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Joseph R. Weintraub, Kate O’Leary, Kerry Roberts Gibson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Motivation

Four of the most common irritants I’ve seen arise as a result of ineffective organization design are: competing priorities, unwanted turnover, inaccessible bosses, and cross-functional rivalry. If you find yourself struggling with one or more of these issues, consider if the design challenges I discuss below may be the deeper cause. Doing so may help you pinpoint, and resolve, the real problem.

Content: Article | Author: Ron Carucci | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

When it comes to hiring, democratic decisions lead to better outcomes. There is wisdom in crowds when it comes to spotting talent. When Google tracked the performance of recent hires against their interview ratings, the company found that averaging the ratings of a group of interviewers was by far a more accurate predictor of success than the rating of a single interviewer, even if that … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Atta Tarki | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

If your company is like most, you’re likely struggling with workplace discrimination, even if you don’t know it. Equity gaps remain a pernicious problem in the U.S., particularly for women and people of color, who, on average, earn less and are under-promoted compared to their white or male counterparts. And though federal law has prohibited workplace discrimination for more than fifty years, those gaps don’t … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Elizabeth C. Tippett | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources, Women in Business

Since its introduction in Harvard Business Review, 16 years ago, the Net Promoter Score, or NPS, has become a foundational business metric. Based on a single question—On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company?—it’s a simple way to get a quick read on consumer sentiment, and it’s been widely embraced in the marketplace. Many leading companies have embedded … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Christina Stahlkopf | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Customer Related

With critical thinking ranking among the most in-demand skills for job candidates, you would think that educational institutions would prepare candidates well to be exceptional thinkers, and employers would be adept at developing such skills in existing employees. Unfortunately, both are largely untrue.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

To demystify what critical thinking is and how it is developed, our team at Zarvana turned … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Matt Plummer | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Personal Development, Training & Development

Companies have long valued the customer insights that online communities can provide, and some, such as Harley-Davidson, have even turned them into a revenue source by charging membership fees. But ensuring the success of online membership communities can be a challenge. You have to attract enough participants to create a dynamic community and, far more challenging, create a high-quality user experience that keeps your participants … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Dorie Clark | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Customer Related

Companies understand that their suppliers are critical partners in lowering costs, increasing quality, and driving innovation, and leaders routinely talk about the need for strategic relationships with shared goals and risks. But when contract negotiations begin, they default to an adversarial mindset and a transactional contracting approach. They agonize over every conceivable scenario and then try to put everything in black-and-white. A variety of contractual … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: David Frydlinger, Kate Vitasek, Oliver Hart | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Best Practices, Legal

Business publications are filled with articles about feedback: how important it is for leaders, how leaders can both give and receive it, what happens when leaders don’t get it, and even what to do if someone is not open to feedback they have been given. The focus tends to be on the transfer of data.

What is less explored is how leaders should respond once they … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jennifer Porter | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Leadership, Personal Development

When we asked over 300 marketing leaders in the U.S. to identify the activities they find most challenging, the number one thing they reported, by a wide margin, was “demonstrating the impact of marketing actions on financial outcomes.”

This is a longstanding challenge for marketers. They want to demonstrate financial impact so that they can show accountability for business results, gain the respect of other business … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Christine Moorman, Nikita Avdiushko, Paul Magill | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Algorithms have taken a lot of heat recently for producing biased decisions. Should we be outraged by bias reflected in algorithmic output? Yes. But the way organizations respond to their algorithms determines whether they make strides in debiasing their decisions or further perpetuate their biased decision making.

Content: Article | Author: Jennifer M. Logg | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, IT / Technology / E-Business

Ideas are the currency of the twenty-first century. The ability to persuade, to change hearts and minds, is perhaps the single greatest skill that will give you a competitive edge in the knowledge economy — an age where ideas matter more than ever.

More than 2,000 years ago Aristotle outlined a formula on how to master the art of persuasion in his work Rhetoric. Many great … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Carmine Gallo | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Personal Development

Interviews have an outsize influence on whether you land the job you want. Even though your application materials reflect your lifetime of experience, a few hours of interaction with a recruiting team often ends up being the determining factor in whether you actually get hired. So, clearly you need to stand out.

To do that, it helps to be mindful of what recruiters and hiring managers … [ Read more ]

Content: Career Information | Author: Art Markman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Interviewing

In most U.S. industries, the biggest firms have a higher market share than they did three decades ago. One study found that 75% of U.S. industries have become more concentrated since the 1990s and that the average size of the largest players in the economy has tripled. A potential concern with this rise in industry concentration is that it reduces workers’ employment options, and thus … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Wenting Ma | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Economics

Peter Cappelli, professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and director of its Center for Human Resources, says managers at companies large and small are doing hiring all wrong. A confluence of changes, from the onslaught of online tools to a rise in recruitment outsourcing, have promised more efficiency but actually made us less effective at finding the best candidates. Cappelli says … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Peter Cappelli | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

One piece of feedback that the executives I coach receive over and over again from their direct reports is: “She doesn’t give enough helpful feedback.”

When I ask these direct reports about the impact this has on them, I find that, in the absence of understanding why they’re getting so little feedback, they often make up their own explanations.

Here are three of the most common stories … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Deborah Grayson Riegel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Communication, Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Strong management teams spend less time obsessing over the current income statement and more time focusing on a different report: the forecast. Not all forecasts are built alike, however. We find that a great forecast has five attributes.

Content: Article | Authors: C. Fritz Foley, Mark Khavkin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Finance

Though AI and other advanced technologies have been applied to improve forecasting accuracy, sales leaders still get blindsided by forecasts that turn out to be embarrassingly overinflated. That’s because the root causes of most inaccuracies are not faulty algorithms but all-too-human behavior. Here are five of the most harmful such behaviors and some techniques that can go a long way toward redesigning systems in ways … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Bob Suh | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Marketing / Sales, Organizational Behavior

A root cause of resistance to change is that employees identify with and care for their organizations. People fear that after the change, the organization will no longer be the organization they value and identify with — and the higher the uncertainty surrounding the change, the more they anticipate such threats to the organizational identity they hold dear. Change leadership that emphasizes what is good … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Merlijn Venus | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Change Management

Companies that implement more structured management practices pay their employees more equally. We found that companies that reported more structured management practices according to the Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS) paid their employees more equally, as measured by the difference between pay for workers at the 90th (top) and 10th (bottom) percentiles within each firm.

Content: Article | Authors: Cristina Tello-Trillo, Melanie Wallskog, Nicholas Bloom, Scott Ohlmacher | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources