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Reach For Greatness – Developing Development

Continuous improvement is one of the key phrases of our age, and it applies as much to employees as to processes. We want our staff to keep developing themselves, to take on new skills and refine their existing ones, to absorb the values and priorities of the organization even as those shift over time. But this isn’t easy. Change is scary and people need to be encouraged. So how can we do that? Developing The Meta A stagnant, unchanging approach to development is clearly counter-productive. If employees are told that they should develop, but they don’t see that the organization itself

Gaining Strength Through Diversity and Inclusion

Corporate culture is all about the attitude a company takes. Nowhere do you define your business more clearly and publicly than in your attitude toward diversity and inclusion. It’s not just a matter of taking a public stance, though that helps. It’s about the way you engage with and motivate both employees and customers. A Stronger Business Through Diversity It’s a truth we’re not all comfortable facing, but business is still dominated by the same small elite it has been for hundreds of years – a group that is white and male, and that tends to recruit more of the same.

Engaging Employees From the Word Go

Ask any teacher or counselor and they’ll tell you, fixing damaged relationships and warped behavior is far harder work than building new patterns from scratch. As such, the arrival of each new employee presents you with a great opportunity, a chance to shape their relationship with the business and their behavior within it. This is your chance to get them engaged before they can developed a mindset of detachment from and disillusionment with their job. So how can you get it right from the very start? Recognize Hopes Every time someone starts a new job they arrive with certain hopes. They

Getting Passionate: Employee Engagement

Employee engagement was one of the most discussed topics of 2014 and the first half of 2015, as leaders looked for ways to get the most out of their employees. Engagement was discussed so much that it risked becoming just one more hollow buzzword, trotted out to justify whatever the speaker was looking to do. But the year ahead will force us to treat engagement seriously, to get to grips ever more deeply with what employees want and what makes them passionate about their work. The Economic Challenge After years of slow recovery, the economy finally started to take off in

Improving The Workplace Culture In Your Value Stream

We talk a lot about improving workplace culture. But it isn’t just the culture that influences your business and the outcomes for your customers. Every business in your value stream has its own culture, as does the value stream itself, the ways that those organizations interact up and down the value chain. The same thing applies when working in partnerships across organizations. The relations between different cultures can create friction. When faced with an outside group people easily revert to defensive behavior. In both these cases you lack the control to directly step in and tell others in the process

Are You Ready for the Millennials to Grow Up?

We’re used to talking about the millennial generation as the fresh young things whose exciting outlook is shaking up the world of business. But the reality is that a decade and a half has passed since we watched all those zeroes line up on our calendars, and the millennial generation is growing up. Millennials generation have made their mark through the different outlook and expectations they bring to work. So the question is, are you for when those expectations meet the life changes of middle age? Founding Families The past twenty years have seen a lot of talk, and even some

Forging a Unique Workplace Culture

Trying to forge a workplace culture for your business can easily go wrong. A culture imposed from the top down can create resistance and disengagement as people feel that it has nothing to do with them. This is in part because such an approach misses the point of any culture. A culture comes from its parts – the skills, values and interests of the people within it coming together to create something far greater. So if you want to create a strong, vibrant workplace culture that employees will engage with, your first step should be looking for what those employees bring.

Three Principles Of Good Communication

Communication is the bedrock of all relationships, whether professional or personal. Getting it right can be particularly hard in the workplace, where people with wildly different ways of thinking and talking are all heavily invested in the topics under discussion. We risk causing offence or difficulties, and fear of that risk can be just as damaging, leading people to hold back key information. So what can you do to ensure good communication? Have Courage We often hold back from communicating what we mean out of fear. Particularly with bad or awkward news, this can be because we fear facing the emotional

Unleash The Power Of Social Media Recruitment

Social media is everywhere in the modern world. Its ability to improve communication and to compel our attention makes it one of the most powerful forces of the 21st century. This makes it incredibly useful to recruiters, but many have yet to unleash that power. So how can you get the most out of social media in recruitment? Innovation And Imitation Most companies have now jumped on the social media bandwagon, making it a feature of their recruitment strategies. But they use it in the way that they used old-fashioned techniques like mass advertising. The old way is a spray-and-pray approach

Reversing The Polarity Of Recruitment

We’ve all seen it in the cinema or on TV. That moment when the beleaguered starship engineer, asked to achieve things his machines were never designed for, declares that he’s going to ‘reverse the polarity!’ None of us, not even the writers who put the words into that character’s mouth, know what this means in technical terms, but we all understand what it represents. It’s about taking the tools he already has and turning them around, using them in new and challenging ways to achieve something even more incredible. So if we want to achieve greater things than we ever have

Branding On The Inside

There are many lessons that can be taken from marketing and applied to HR. From the obvious point of how best to advertise a job to ways of spreading messages and training through an organization, marketing has been a source of useful innovation for HR for years. One of the most powerful tools, and one of the most often misapplied, is branding. The Surface Of The Brand On the surface, brands are all about image. Consistent visuals, voice and style are important in getting the brand across. As a result, many attempts at internal branding focus on these features. It’s about

Purple Recruit: Applying Seth Godin’s Branding Ideas To HR

Brand marketing is a field that contains many innovators and sharp thinkers. Nowhere is this more visible than in the work of Seth Godin, author of books such as Linchpin and Purple Cow, has turned old mass marketing practices upside down, showing a more personal, more human and vastly more effective way of marketing. But his insights, like so many from marketing, can also be applied in other areas. Godin’s ideas give us some great material to apply in HR. The Employment Brand Godin has talked about all sorts of fascinating aspects of the human brand — how we can turn

‘Recognize’ For Better Employee Engagement

Statistics show that 88% of employees don’t feel passionate about their work, and that this level of employee disengagement is costing the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Employee disengagement is a huge problem for businesses looking to get the most out of their employees and to retain them in the long term. This makes engagement the number one priority for many managers. It’s easy to leap in and try to make changes in search of better engagement. But the best starting place is to acknowledge what’s already there. Recognize Differences Productivity often comes from finding and using

Rise To The Challenge: Live Your Impact

How much difference did you make today? If you were to step back and look at that work, would you feel like you added real value to the world, or just kept things ticking over? It’s easy to slip into doing the same old thing with your work, to take the safe options rather than rise to the challenge, to follow the aims set out for you by others. Easy but not satisfying, and not the best that you could do for you or for the world around you. Rising To The Challenge If you want to make a difference, then

Looking Beyond HR

Some business improvement professionals believe the goal of their work is to make themselves redundant, to take their company to the point where improvement is self-sustaining and they are no longer needed. Is it time for us, as HR professionals, to look at our jobs the same way? To ask whether the benefits we bring can be embedded in a wider company culture? Whether we can move on from working in human resources and become something more? I Am Not a Resource The paradigm we currently work within, the one upon which human resources departments are built, is an early 20th

The Power To Lead Organizational Change

We all have the power within us to create real and lasting change. To transform the place we work into something finer and more efficient, no matter how good a position it started from. Change gives us the potential to be not just good but great, to continually aspire to more. Somebody has to lead that change, and, if you’re willing to embrace the right attitude and values, it can be you. Create Credibility The first step in driving change is to build credibility, both for yourself and for the changes you want to see. Rosabeth Moss Kanter has listed five

Social Recruitment’s Present And Future

Social media has entered every corner of our lives. Facebook alone has more than a billion users, each averaging 15 minutes a day on the site. From the accumulated star ratings on websites to jobs found through LinkedIn and sharing holiday photos through Facebook, this crowded, chaotic world of human interaction is everywhere. Like any technological change, the usefulness of social media is directly related to the human skills used to apply it. Social media is now a huge part of any company’s approach to marketing, and while it’s less prevalent in recruitment, it is playing a role there. But that

Matching Book Smarts And People Smarts

We all know that there’s more to succeeding in life than having book smarts. People skills, whether it’s understanding ourselves or working well with others, are equally important. But there’s a gap between this common understanding and the way we educate people for the world of work. So where does that gap come from, and what can we do to tackle it? An Education Gap As I’ve previously discussed, there’s a big gap between what businesses need from education and what the system provides. People skills are among the ones that our schools give little time to, but which we most

Beyond Work-Life Balance – Finding Your Passion

What do you want to do with your life? I mean really want to do, not just what you’ve accepted to get by? Many of us believe in following our passions, but few actually do this. Following your passion — whether it’s the job you always dreamed of or something you stumbled upon unexpectedly — is the key to staying motivated and happy in your job and in your life. Passion as a Motivator You know that feeling when you’re itching to get out of bed in the morning and get on with your work? When the idea of starting on

Three Steps To Better Staff Development

Staff development is vital to a healthy business. Yet the way we approach it is still rooted in the models of fifty years ago. Despite a world of rapid change we expect objectives to be relevant for a year, when many will be out of date within months. Millenials used to swift, relevant feedback from a communications-obsessed world instead find appraisals occasional and slow. Few organizations take account of the growing number of emergent cross-department teams. While every modern organization has a performance management system to support staff development, only 14% are happy with those systems. How can we do better?

How Education Is Failing To Serve Business’ Needs

Education is one of the triumphs of modern civilization. According to census data, over 40% of the U.S. population has an associate degree or higher. With higher education attendance continuing to rise, it’s only a matter of time before half the population has degrees. But is all of this education really serving our needs, either as a society or as a business community? Stirring the pot of debate This is not an issue confined within the borders of the U.S.; it can be seen across multiple developed countries and regions. As an example, while every pronouncement of the UK government’s controversial

Career Inspiration: Strive To Be These 3 Things

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt We live in an age when we allow ourselves to be ruled by our fears. The more we have the more we curl in on ourselves to defend it, clinging to our past achievements rather than reaching forward for more. But nobody ever achieved great things through caution. It is boldness of speech and action, the willingness to let go of our fears and step bravely forward, which allows us to be the best that we can. Einstein didn’t become the most famous scientist in the world

How To Find Employees With The Right Attitude

Attitude over aptitude is the rallying cry for many in modern recruitment. All our fancy personality tests and scouring of resumes has given us a fair imitation of the recruits that we wanted in the past, but it’s never provider a reliable indicator that they would fit in well with a team or company. Employment options are now ever more fractured and specific, so that almost anyone will have to learn on the job rather than bringing a full skill set to their role. Finding someone with the right attitude, with enthusiasm and a willingness to learn, with a personality that

The Biggest Nail In Workplace Culture

Some people say that the nail that stands out will get hammered down. These are the people who want you to keep your head down and not make a fuss, just do your hours at your desk and then head home. These people fear being the nail that stands out, and they’ll share that fear. But there’s another sort of nail that stands out. On proud display at Stanford University is a nail that united a nation – the Golden Spike, used to complete the First Transcontinental Railroad. Because sometimes the nail that stands out gets hammered down, but sometimes it

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Mark Lukens

Mark Lukens

Reach For Greatness – Developing Development

Gaining Strength Through Diversity and Inclusion

Engaging Employees From the Word Go

Getting Passionate: Employee Engagement

Improving The Workplace Culture In Your Value Stream

Are You Ready for the Millennials to Grow Up?

Forging a Unique Workplace Culture

Three Principles Of Good Communication

Reversing The Polarity Of Recruitment

Branding On The Inside

Purple Recruit: Applying Seth Godin’s Branding Ideas To HR

‘Recognize’ For Better Employee Engagement

Rise To The Challenge: Live Your Impact

Looking Beyond HR

The Power To Lead Organizational Change

Matching Book Smarts And People Smarts

Beyond Work-Life Balance – Finding Your Passion

Three Steps To Better Staff Development

How Education Is Failing To Serve Business’ Needs

Career Inspiration: Strive To Be These 3 Things

How To Find Employees With The Right Attitude

The Biggest Nail In Workplace Culture

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Mark Lukens

Mark Lukens

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