Tag Archive for: Organizational Behavior

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Responding to the Resignation Crisis

One of the topics I discuss in my book, Next Generation Leadership, is how to respond to the resignation crisis. I discovered that, among many tactics, one which appears to be highly effective is cultivating an alumni network. If it is true that Generation Y, or Millennials, are leaving their organisations with frightening rapidity, my research show that this is in fact their expectation.  They are often anticipating leaving every two to five years from one organisation to the next. 

Then, it’s best that we consider how we might allow them to come back at some point in the future. So, they may not stay for more than two to five years at a time, but perhaps we can convince them to come back two, three times over the course of their careers, and in so doing, the develop new, senior leadership skills, customer relations skills, sales skills, whatever it might be, which you didn’t have to pay for, and then you get them back, and you get the benefit of all that new development. So how do we cultivate an alumni network? Well, professional services organisations like McKinsey or Accenture are world class at maintaining their alumni networks, so we can learn a thing or two from them. They even hold reunions in many cases, just as a university would, of their former employees because these people are currently clients, they’re customers, they’re net promoters.  You certainly don’t want them to be net detractors!  

But what too many organisations do, instead of cultivating those relationships, instead of holding alumni reunions, instead of keeping a social network alive, is when someone resigns they say, ‘Oh, you’re leaving? Ok, leave your swipe card on the desk and don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out.’ That’s certainly not the way forward. We want to keep a workforce, whether it’s in one go at a time or two or three goes at a time because we’re living in a world where young employees want mobility from job to job.  Sometimes those future collaborations might be contractor positions instead of full-time employee engagements, and that’s fine.  Certainly we need to make working with us as attractive as possible, so that over the course of their careers, we can collaborate with the high potentials for as long as possible. The only thing is – it may not be all in one go. 

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Humanising Leadership

Work life has fundamentally changed over the last 150 years. We’ve seen technology evolve how we work, we’ve seen scientific management evolve how we work, we’ve seen Six Sigma evolve how we work. We’ve seen other forms of agility, adaptability, etc., evolve how we work. However, the act of management, the habits, processes, and technologies of management have fundamentally not changed since the industrial revolution. As a result, we are facing an engagement crisis, and I don’t need to tell you that we are also in the midst of a resignation crisis. That’s because work is becoming more incremental, inertial, and inhuman. Fundamentally inhuman.  

Covid didn’t cause these crises, but they accelerated the trends, as we were forced home to contemplate our lives and fulfilment.  We’ve seen the engagement crisis evident for years in polls such as the Gallup Survey, which indicates that only about 13% of the global workforce are engaged in their jobs, 62% are disengaged, and about a quarter are actively disengaged, meaning that they hate their employment so much that they would sabotage their organisation given half a chance.  As dramatically depressing as those statistics are, the real tragedy is that most managers don’t seem to care enough to do much about it.  When I share these survey results in front of executive audiences, the most common reaction I see is resigned acceptance: a shrug, a shake of the head, eyes downcast.  

We simply have to get angry about this state of affairs in order finally to change it.  I would argue that you wouldn’t see this reaction in similar circumstances with professionals other than ‘managers’.  If I were addressing an audience of general practitioner doctors and told them, ‘I interviewed all the patients you saw over the past year and their families.  Here are the results.  13% of your patients got better.  25% died, and 62% reported that seeing you made no difference to their health whatsoever.’  Those GPs would be up in arms!  They would be demanding that the practice of medicine be completely reimagined in the face of these results and particularly if they largely didn’t change year to year.  Yet again, corporate managers have grown accustomed to such dire results to the point that they neither act upon nor even dwell on them.    

What’s the solution? Not more management!  At least not more management in terms of the definition of ‘to control’, but more management in relation to being more human, more empathetic, helping our people, and by extension our organisations to be more relevant tomorrow than they are today. This, I believe is the challenge of leadership in the 21st century: humanising management. 

To find out more, please go to my website www.adamkingl.com.

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Work-Life Balance

When I wrote my book Next Generation Leadership, I interviewed Generation Ys, Generation Xers and Baby Boomers, and I asked them about work-life balance. My first question was, ‘What do you mean when you say work-life balance?’ What was very interesting is that I learned that there’s semantic discord among the generations about their definitions of that term. 

For most Gen Xs and Baby Boomers, work-life balance is a ‘when’ question. In other words, when they hear ‘work-life balance’ they would interpret that the speaker wants to work fewer hours, which can lead them to conclude, ‘They don’t want to pay the dues that I paid, and so they’re lazy. So it goes, and that contributes to this incorrect prejudice that Gen Ys are somehow lazy. 

When I ask Gen Ys what they mean when they say or hear ‘work-life balance’, they generally say that this is a ‘where’ statement. In other words, technology allows me to work wherever I want. Therefore, what they’re looking for is flexibility in terms of location of work. What they’re rejecting is face-time culture, being chained to your desk, not being able to leave the office until the boss leaves, etc. 

Of course, what we learned since Covid is that we should in fact have flexibility in terms of workplace location. And yes, I know that it does vary based on your function or industry whether it is possible to work from home or elsewhere, but nevertheless this is an important semantic discord for us to notice and understand. A great solution is to ask one another before you get into a work-life balance conversation is ‘Well, what do you mean when you say work-life balance in your context,’ to make sure that you aren’t speaking at cross-purposes. 

For more from my articles, media, book and speaking, please visit adamkingl.com

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The Evolution of Capitalism: Profit or Purpose?

HR Magazine, 26 January 2022

The Evolution of Capitalism

Profit or Purpose?

Adam Kingl

Is profit the fundamental criterion for a business?  As capitalism is evolving under our feet, and that evolution is accelerating since Covid, we’re seeing a shift of emphasis from the pre-eminence of shareholders to stakeholders: customers, employees and communities.  Now, I want to make a very important distinction.  This does not mean that shareholders are getting the short end of the stick in terms of reward.  If companies refocus or even redefine how they add value to stakeholders, then shareholders are rewarded too.  

At a macrolevel, this shift that we are just starting to observe is essentially a rebalance in corporate focus from outcomes to outputs.  If we think of outcomes as share price and profit, we cannot deny that these are good things to have.  But I can’t storm into the office and say that my focus today will be to maximise my share price. What am I supposed to DO??  A blinkered focus on share price creates drift away from the reasons a company was founded in the first place: to identify a market need and to serve customers brilliantly.  Creating value for customers and serving them better are outputs that companies can rally behind, can guide whether to spend more time on activity A or activity B.  My outputs will lead to the outcome of enhancing my bottom line.  But the outcome is not my daily focus – this is a subtle but hugely important point.  

Does this mean that the CEO would not want to earn a profit?  Absolutely not. Business has to survive and thrive.  Here’s the rub.  Most businesses were founded on an idea of introducing an exciting product to the world, serving a previously undiscovered market need, bettering a community or creating employment opportunities.  But then financial analysts’ opinions grew in importance to investors, with their use of various ratios that are useful shortcuts in assessing company health.  However, we must remember that these shortcuts are only performance indicators for today; they do not assess if the business is closer to or farther from achieving its purpose, closer to or farther from achieving long-term or ‘moon shot’ objectives.

Chasing ratio optimization is a short-term game.  Before one knows it, the purpose of the business is about tacitly, implicitly pleasing analysts.  Making decisions toward long-term objectives takes a back seat, and sustained success can become much harder to achieve over time. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened on a massive scale.  At an inflection point in the second half of the twentieth century, as analysts’ and shareholders’ voices became louder, the CFOs’ and Investor Relations’ departments began to dominate the c-suite conversations. CEOs’ compensations grew increasingly related to share price and less on customer value indicators.  The focus on outputs dropped down the totem pole in terms of time and attention in favour of outcomes.  One could argue that the Great Recession of 2007-09 was caused, or at least made much worse, by this shift in focus.   

Companies that remain focused on their purpose are rewarded by investors and customers.  Aggregate research has proven that such purpose-focused firms significantly outperform their rivals.  The authors of the book, Firms of Endearment, explored those organisations who are in the top ten percent in relation to focusing on their purpose, community, customers and employees.  Their research revealed that, over the decade ending in June 2006, these firms returned 1,025% to their shareholders, compared to 122% return on investment by the S&P 500 overall.  Just to be clear, this study therefore quantified that purpose-driven organisations reward their investors better than the market average by a multiple of ten!  

Separate research published in Organization Science reached a similar conclusion.  Faculty from Harvard, Pennsylvania and Columbia Universities surveyed half a million employees across 429 firms.  While these academics did not find correlation between purpose alone and financial performance, they proved that companies with strong purpose and high clarity from management exhibit stronger financial and stock market performance.  The implication is that one condition of commercial success is that an organisation’s employees understand and believe in their collective purpose and have a clear path as to how that purpose will be achieved.  

Perhaps our ultimate question is: Are purpose and profit a zero-sum game?  Recent research indicates this is not necessarily so, and the two forces may even serve each other.  A huge amount of dialogue has attempted to answer this question both in media and in conferences.  The opinions are typically more definitive than one may guess and often resemble the sentiment: ‘The most successful companies, both in profitability and longevity, are the ones who recognise the absolute necessity of profits as well as the equally high necessity of having a purpose beyond shareholders’ wealth.’

Adam Kingl (adamkingl.com) is the author of Next Generation Leadership and is an Adjunct Lecturer at the UCL School of Management, where this theme of the evolution of capitalism is explored in the School’s executive education practice and notably in its Building Competitive Advantage through Sustainability course: https://www.mgmt.ucl.ac.uk/executive-education. 

https://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/content/comment/the-evolution-of-capitalism-profit-or-purpose

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Managing Diverse Collaboration in a Virtual Environment When Leading Innovation

Managing Diverse Collaboration in a Virtual Environment When Leading Innovation

Adam Kingl

A plethora of collaboration dysfunctions can easily derail innovation conversations.  I began conducting a number of experiments ten years ago to explore virtual and face to face dynamics, and which may be optimal, when holding conversations requiring creative inputs from a team.  These experiments demonstrated that team leaders should consider continuing to hold at least some of their innovation discussions on virtual platforms, even if the pandemic would technically allow the team to meet in person.  There are two important reasons for this recommendation.  

First, charisma or extraversion, a traditional leadership trait, is often disintermediated in a virtual environment.  The extrovert jumps in with their contribution first and often, while the introvert is still processing options and responses.  But on an asynchronous, virtual discussion platform like a discussion board, team members cannot rely on force of personality to push solutions, but on the clarity and quality of their ideas.  Introverts, and those who are less confident working in a second language, may actually thrive more in a virtual team.

Second, merit has more power than familiarity or hierarchy in virtual teams.  We have all experienced how factors such as cultural norms, gender, career levels and reporting lines contribute to only a few voices, sometimes only one voice, dominating in a room.  Most of our organisations’ architectures are predicated on a pyramidal hierarchy, which for centuries has suggested a tacit dogma of the manager’s infallibility.  This canon has ruined many millions of meetings, where idea creation gives way to waiting for the leader to contribute, and then the rest of the team either agreeing or remaining silent.  

In a virtual, asynchronous environment, team members scan reflect before answering, the less confident can reply thoughtfully and bravely.  Adding anonymity to contributions reduces the senior voices from owning the lion’s share of the conversation.  The best ideas rise to the top instead of those which happen to be from the most senior.  Therefore, if an important objective of any leader is to bring out the best in everyone, then he or she should consider utilising a virtual forum for at least some discussions and particularly if managing a very diverse team.  

Two important points to remember when considering virtual teamwork:

First, technology does not solve every problem.  Virtual teamwork can fail if leaders do not attend to the fundamental problems of coordinating, engaging, and motivating individuals, particularly across time zones.  It’s easy for team members to disengage when they’re not face-to-face, so the leader must convey a high degree of enthusiasm and clarity and agree on who is accountable for what from the start. 

Second, it is dangerous to assume everyone has the same understanding of how the virtual team with work together.  For example, will everyone be in one virtual ‘place’ at the same time, or will they contribute on their own time?  To lead a virtual team, the leader must focus more on team maintenance (‘How are we going to work together?’) before task maintenance (‘’What is the creative solution to the problem or opportunity?’).  

When to Leverage the Expert or the Crowd

I am mindful that the expert in the team must still be given his or her due in creative conversations, particularly when understanding technical issues or opportunities would be key.  I would argue that the smaller the team, the more this lesson is true.  On the other hand, a possibly negative team dynamic that could occur is that the expert is used to being right and may win a debate just through the power of his or her own confidence and of having more data to hand.  With larger teams, I recommend a balance between considering the expert view and leveraging the collective wisdom inherent in diversity and large groups.  The following table is a short-hand guide suggesting when to utilise the expert and when the ‘crowd’ in a given team.

Size of Team

Use of Experts

Use of Diverse Group

Small (seven or fewer people)

Experts are more likely to provide some of the best answers

May not have powerful diversity in a small number so the ‘crowd’ is less likely to provide the best answers

Medium (eight to twenty people)

Solicit the experts’ opinions separately from the group to avoid rushing to an answer

Discuss with the team before bringing the experts back into the dialogue

Large (twenty-one plus people)

Solicit the experts’ opinions; test the team’s collective view of those opinions 

Survey the team’s views and look for trends and averages

Organisation-wide

Gather a group of experts with diverse views to test the emerging views of the wider organisation for rigour and/or to ask follow-up questions

Consider using an internal company platform or social media to collect large samples, votes and discussion boards to test ideas

Another solution may be to consider the views of the crowd and the expert separately, so that one view does not influence or anchor the other, and then share for discussion.  A final recommendation is to find ways in which the emerging collective view is not a victim of groupthink.  

A diverse group’s mosaic of different views can balance the important but perhaps narrower view of the expert. The challenge for the manager of such a team or organisation is to find incentives and create cultural norms that make the soliciting of views a regular occurrence, while identifying patterns, averages and trends in those views, and then encouraging rigorous debate.  Instead of following the cliché of ‘agreeing to disagree,’ perhaps embracing multiple and diverse points of view could lead to the stronger though less intuitive paradigm of ‘disagreement to convergence.’  

Adam Kingl (www.adamkingl.com) is an Associate of the Moller Institute, Churchill College, University of Cambridge.  He is the author of the book Next Generation Leadership and an educator and adviser.  Formerly, Adam was the Regional Managing Director, Europe, of Duke Corporate Education and the Executive Director of Thought Leadership at London Business School.  

https://indd.adobe.com/view/bb16cf03-6c8a-4d66-8ae3-90c406118980

Inspire Magazine, The Møller Institute at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, Issue 4, Leadership Mindsets, pp.32-33

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Inspire Magazine: Next Generation Leadership Book Launch

Inspire Magazine, The Møller Institute: Issue 4, Leadership Mindsets, p. 16

Book Launches

Next Generation Leadership: How To Ensure Young Talent Will Thrive With Your Organisation

  • Adam Kingl

We are on the verge of a seismic shift in a world of work.  Why are we toil, the employer-employee social contract, leadership, retirement and the nature of business itself are changing before our eyes in ways as least as significant as what humanity and served in the early days of the industrial revolution. And it all starts with understanding Generation Y.

Generation Ys (or Millennials), are youngest workers have been slandered for a decade. You’ve heard the accusations before: Gen Ys are indolent, spoiled, coddled, uninterested in climbing the corporate ladder, ever texting, indifferent about what it takes to succeed. Those who aren’t quite so critical merely laugh off these generalisations saying, ‘Oh we were like them when we were young too.’

In reality, to be so dismissive us to ignore macro-trends that have forever altered fundamental models of work and employment.

These trends include insecure retirement, the failures of shareholder capitalism and longer lifespans. What we observe in Generation Y is merely the first, widely shared rejection of their inheritance—the world as we know it.

This rejection manifested itself in what confounds, annoys and terrifies human resources department the world over: scarce loyalty to one’s employer, a trivialising of financial benefits, a hue and cry for work-life balance, a craving for constant development, and an insistence on a powerful, shared, authentic corporate purpose. Kingl’s research in his new book Next Generation Leadership explores what’s behind these shifts in the character of the emerging workforce and the implications for how we might need to manage and lead differently today. How might we recruit, retain and develop top talent?

Most importantly, if Gen Y indeed requires a different style of leadership, then as Gen Y assumes managerial positions themselves, then the nature of leadership and of business itself will also change over the next few decades in irrevocable and profound ways.

“Nuggets of gold which challenge the way we should lead our multi generational teams / organisations.”

https://indd.adobe.com/view/bb16cf03-6c8a-4d66-8ae3-90c406118980

UCLSOM

The Cost of the Global Resignation Crisis

UCL School of Management

20 JANUARY 2022

THE COST OF THE GLOBAL RESIGNATION CRISIS

Notebook with the title "the great resignation' clipped to an arrow pointing left.

Recent studies indicate that almost 55% of the global workforce are considering resigning from their current role. Adam Kingl has been discussing the innovation and finance implications of the current resigning crisis. 

Adam’s research indicated that the “great resignation” phenomenon was already growing before the pandemic when he found that 90% of millennials (who compose about 60% of the global workforce) do not plan to stay with their employers for more than five years, and over a third plan to leave within two years.

Replacing an employee can be costly for organisations, averaging around half to two times their annual salary. Adam explains the implications can be more severe for professional services firms, such as law firms and consultancies where a partnership model is most common, but that it has drastic implications for all organisations.

He advises that to keep employees engaged and reduce the high levels of resignations employers must focus on; development, organisational culture and purpose. He says organisations must “reconsider the models in our organisations and think about how we can still imbue people with purpose and values so that they will stay a little bit longer, but also create those organisational designs that are not necessarily ‘up or out’.”

Read the full article

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Putting a price tag on the Great Resignation

While we’ve been talking about the global resignation crisis anecdotally, we now have figures that reveal the scale of the emergency.

A Microsoft study indicated that 41% of the global workforce are considering resigning within one year, and a Fast Company article suggested that this number may actually be as high as 55%. As many as one in four employees may be considering leaving their roles within six to 12 months.

My own research indicated that this phenomenon was already growing before the pandemic when l learned 90% of millennials (who compose about 60% of the global workforce) do not plan to stay with their employers for more than five years, and over a third plan to leave within two years.

To put a price tag on the problem, if the average cost of replacing an employee is between one half to two times their annual salary, then a 100-person company with an average salary of £60,000 could be facing replacement costs in 2022 of between £750,000 and £3,000,000.

The implications of the resignation crisis are especially dire for professional services firms. I’m thinking of management consultancies, accounting and law firms that have a partnership model in particular.

Initially, this model only worked if graduates knew they were on an 10-year journey to make partner, but what if those graduates don’t care about becoming partners anymore? Then the social architecture of the venerable ‘firm’ would crumble.

But in just about any type of organisation, the life-long corporate citizen is going the way of the dodo. As a result, a number of long-held assumptions around how to retain talent are being overthrown.

Since pensions aren’t what they used to be, with the inevitable transition from final salary to defined contribution schemes, and average salaries have not grown concomitantly with inflation over the last 30 years, salaries and pensions are just not serving as the ‘golden handcuffs’ of yesteryear.

Instead, my research indicates that the top factors at employee engagement today are development, culture and purpose:

  • Development can no longer be a reward for tenure since top talent won’t wait for up to 10 years for that management development programme. Upskilling and continuous, rather than intermittent, development is the new norm.
  • Organisational culture has to be visible in shared behaviours and actions, not values and platitudes in the annual shareholder reports and on colourful posters in the lifts.
  • Purpose must be lived and companies must be curious about each colleague’s own choices in their professional lives and why they choose to work here.

I frequently talk to firms who are seriously questioning their philosophy of work and the architecture of how they are composed.

We have to reconsider the models in our organisations and think about how we can still imbue people with purpose and values so that they will stay a little bit longer, but also create those organisational designs that are not necessarily ‘up or out’.

That aspiration must involve working on purpose and legacy, particularly with senior executives, those in the last trimester of their careers, who might otherwise be thinking, ‘Well, there’s very little else that you can teach me’.

I would want to get this stakeholder group together and ask them to think about the type of firm that they wish to leave for their successors. How might it be possible to have more fluid movement in and out of the organisation?

In that way, top talent might include those who are en route to becoming enterprise leaders, or might become future clients, or might become suppliers or partners, or might ultimately want to work on a contractor basis. After all, over 60% of the world’s work is now organised according to projects.

Top young talent might even want to return as senior executives later in your company’s life. In other words, they might join a firm two or three times during their careers, coming in and out of the organisation with greater dexterity than most companies would currently tolerate.

It really involves rethinking how you work and how you are structured, but those difficult conversations have to begin now.

Adam Kingl is the author of Next Generation Leadership and an adjunct lecturer at the UCL School of Management

HR Magazine, Published: 19 Jan 2022

https://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/content/comment/putting-a-price-tag-on-the-great-resignation

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The Great Resignation and What We Can Do About It

The press has recently been discussing what appears to be a resignation crisis that we’re facing globally. After all, there are four million people who quit their jobs in April 2021 in the U.S., a twenty-year high. There were a record ten million job vacancies in June. A Microsoft study indicated that 41 percent of the global workforce are considering resigning within one year, and a Fast Company article suggested that number may be as high as 55 percent.

The implications of the resignation crisis are especially dire for professional services firms. I’m thinking of management consultancies, accounting, and law firms that have a partnership model in particular. Initially, the partnership model only worked if graduates knew they were on an eight to twelve-year journey to make partner, but what if those graduates don’t care about making partner anymore? The social architecture of the venerable ‘firm’ is crumbling.

But in just about any type of organization, the life-long corporate citizen is going the way of the dodo. Research from my book, Next Generation Leadership, has shown that Generation Y (or the Millennial generation) is considering leaving any given employer on average every two to five years. As a result, a number of long-held assumptions around how to retain talent are being overthrown. Since pensions aren’t what they used to be, with the inevitable transition from final salary to defined contribution schemes, and average salaries not growing concomitantly with inflation over the last thirty years, salaries and pensions are just not serving as the ‘golden handcuffs’ of yesteryear. Instead, my research indicates that the top factors at employee engagement today are development, culture, and purpose:

  • Development can no longer be a reward for tenure since top talent won’t wait for five to ten years for that management development program. Upskilling and continuous, rather than intermittent, development is the new norm.
  • Organizational culture has to be visible in shared behaviors and actions, not values and platitudes in the annual shareholder reports and on colorful posters in the lifts.
  • Purpose must be lived and companies must be curious about each colleague’s own choices in their professional lives and why they choose to work here.

I frequently talk to firms who are seriously questioning their philosophy of work and the architecture of how they are composed. We have to reconsider the models in our organizations and think about how we can still imbue people with purpose and values so that they will stay a little bit longer, but also create those organizational designs that are not necessarily ‘up or out’. That aspiration must involve working on purpose and legacy, particularly with senior executives, those in the last trimester of their careers, who might otherwise be thinking, ‘Well, there’s very little else that you can teach me.’

I would want to get this stakeholder group together ask them to think about the type of firm that they wish to leave for their successors. How might it be possible to have more fluid movement in and out of the organization? In that way, top talent might include those who are en route to becoming enterprise leaders, or might become future clients, or might become suppliers or partners, or might ultimately want to work on a contractor basis. After all, over sixty percent of the world’s work is now organized according to projects.

Top young talent might even want to return as senior executives later in your company’s life. In other words, they might join two or three times during the course of their careers, coming in and out of your organization with greater dexterity than most companies would currently tolerate. It really involves rethinking how you work and how you are structured, but those difficult conversations have to begin now.

Adam Kingl is an Adjunct Professor at Hult International Business School, www.adamkingl.com