In my last article I wrote about recent research published by Harvard Business Review revealing that women at every job level are rated by their peers, their managers, their direct reports, and their other co-workers as better overall leaders than their male counterparts. Furthermore, it is women at the highest levels of leadership that outscore their male counterparts the most significantly. The study found that women are rated higher in a total of 12 out of the 16 essential leadership competencies. And in seven out of 16 competencies, female leaders outscored men dramatically (a T value above 7).
Now, it’s time to break down women’s leadership strengths into actionable steps. The key leadership competency in which women outperformed men by the greatest amount was “Taking Initiative.”
Think about your job. Why do you show up every day? For the paycheck? So you don’t get fired? Because it’s one of those things you just have to do? Now imagine that same job – except that you have no set hours, guaranteed job security, and the autonomy to determine most of your own responsibilities. Would you still be at work every day?
I’ve had the opportunity this past year to talk to a wide range of professionals, and a consistent question I hear is, “How do I do more with less?” In addition, you are telling me that your busyness and disconnection are at an all time high. The following five questions will help you assess what changes you can make to get back more time in your day and reconnect to what matters.
Recent research published by Harvard Business Review reveals that women at every job level are rated by their peers, their managers, their direct reports, and their other co-workers as better overall leaders than their male counterparts. Furthermore, it is women at the highest levels of leadership that outscore their male counterparts the most significantly. In other words, female CEOs, CFOs, and COOs are very noticeably better leaders than male CEOs, CFOs and COOs, according to the people in their company.
These days it seems like every recruiter has a love/hate relationship with pre-employment assessments. On one hand, they simplify hiring and reduce time-to-hire. On the other, they are overly formulaic, irritate candidates, and are easily manipulated. Just last week, I was talking to a recruiter who thought it was time to throw in the towel on pre-employment assessments. She thought it wasn’t worth the headache and wasn’t convinced the results were any better then her gut.
What she didn’t realize was that there is a new option: resource matching. Charles Handler wrote a fantastic article on matching last week. Using this as a jumping off point, let’s dive into a comparison between pre-employment assessments and resourcing matching.
How many times have you heard about The Power of Positive Thinking? From childhood, reading books like The Little Engine That Could and hearing our parents and teachers say “If you think you can’t, you’re right,” we’re taught the benefits of optimism and pitfalls of pessimism. Yet when most companies want to expand and improve, they look for a problem. People are trained to use a deficiency model which asks questions like, “What are we doing wrong?” and “How can we fix it?” so they can improve upon their practices by providing solutions to those problems. Why is this? Why not apply everything we’ve been taught about optimism to our business practices? Appreciative inquiry does just that.
Research conducted at thousands of companies worldwide reveals that employees who do not have a “best friend” at work have only a 1 in 12 chance of being engaged on the job. Those same surveys revealed that only 30% of employees DO have a best friend a work.1 Clearly, we’ve got plenty of room for improvement and an opportunity to astronomically increase employee engagement. But how do we tap into this potential goldmine?
First, managers need to set the example! Second, companies need to teach their employees basic communication standards.
The third key to tapping into the bottom-line benefits of having employees who are friends is to create opportunities for employees to connect!
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Have you ever wanted expert advice on hiring processes, balancing your home and work lives, or how to get your dream job? Whether you’re searching for information or just need to satisfy your HR fix, we can tell you where to look. We’ve scoured the internet for the best of the best, and these twenty HR blogs are the finest out there. Enjoy!
When I was a young attorney, I attended a real estate closing with a female real estate partner in my office. She had been practicing for years, had successfully navigated the pressure cooker of working in a large law firm, was on several prestigious boards, and had a cache of clients willing to pay her top dollar for her advice. She was the living version of what I thought a successful woman attorney was supposed to be like. While we were in the car traveling to the closing, we talked about careers in the legal profession and balancing it all. Being a newbie, I was anxious to soak up any nuggets of wisdom she might pass along. Instead, she said, “Really, anybody can do what I’ve done. I was just in the right place at the right time and was lucky enough to have found a good mentor.” I remember the panic I felt because what she was telling me was that her success was not of her own doing; and therefore, I was out of luck in trying to replicate it.
In my last article I wrote about recent research published by Harvard Business Review revealing that women at every job level are rated by their peers, their managers, their direct reports, and their other co-workers as better overall leaders than their male counterparts. Furthermore, it is women at the highest levels of leadership that outscore their male counterparts the most significantly. The study found that women are rated higher in a total of 12 out of the 16 essential leadership competencies. And in seven out of 16 competencies, female leaders outscored men dramatically (a T value above 7).
