Truth Lies at the Center

Recently, I have  increased time and energy  to spiritual practice which asks that I  ”unhook” from preconceptions, past experiences, and future worries and  stay present in the NOW – the gift that each moment offers as a lens to the Truth of who I am, who we are, at the core.

Although a peaceful way to start each day, taking time for a centering practice can interfere with the  frenetic pace of networking, marketing, proposal writing, service delivery and recordkeeping as the thought static of “just get things done!” overrides the gentle calmed focus on a  singular moment in time.

Today, I considered joining the two endeavors- work and spiritual practice, (at least in metaphor).   Closing my eyes, I sat quietly imagining the innermost ring of the WillowOak tree outside our home and which inspired my company’s name and asked:

“How have you thrived and expanded despite flooding rains, scorching heat, brutal cold?”

The answer came;

“I focus on what has nourished me  from the beginning: sun (light), water (flow) and earth ( grounding presence).

In my work with WillowOak HR Consulting, I focus on helping leaders and teams go to the light of what spawned their initial growth, why they came to be.  Then, by staying grounded and present in shared stories of success, employees discover and flow from these stories towards an imagined future and goal achievement despite external challenges.

In sum, organizations thrive from a staunch focus on their positive core.

Light…Flow…Grounding Presence. A way of getting things done in the NOW.

Join me for an inspiring and thought provoking talk on leadership and how you can harness the best of your abilities into a new year!

leadership in a ripe tomato

Watching a seed sprout up from my garden infused with the bright hue of newness draws my attention to the incubation of my leadership philosophy and practice planted in my heart by my grandfather as he led me to his garden when I was very young.

Grandpa would take me to the tomato plants and show me how to carefully pluck the “suckers” out, explaining that they take the nutrients that were meant to grow the tomato flower into a beautiful ripe tomato. He told me that taking care of these plants had to be done daily, sometimes twice a day. He likened the attention to his plants to that of tending to loved ones.  With his native Italian accent, he declared, “Linta, you must treat your garden and your tomato plants like family; nurture them and they will grow into beautiful fruits.” A master plasterer by day, alive and shining in the sunshine of his garden on a Sunday afternoon – he became in that moment more than Grandpa –  from that day forward  also a gentle teacher, mentor and servant- leader.

Our extended  family often joked Grandpa about the formal attire he would wear when tending his garden, always dressed in a white shirt, clean shaven, with dress pants and black shoes, standing proudly among tomato plants, sprigs of lettuce, cucumbers and squash. He tended his garden as he served his God – with respect, attention and love. Little did he or I know how his lesson would last in me and find its application to my life and  growth as a leader.  Knowing the back story on a red, ripe tomato from Grandpa’s garden has given me insight into the awesome responsibility of leadership which, in the simplist and perhaps most defining sense is the responsibility to help people grow. It  requires constant care, removal of obstacles that impede growth and loving service – ripe leadership.

I invite you to add your own inspiration from the simple things we sometimes take for granted that have formed lasting lessons on the path of your growth as a leader. Sometimes the back story lasts a lifetime…

‘Every organisation needs a positive revolution’.  With this strong statement – a variation on the great Thomas Jefferson quote – renowned AI consultant and author Diana Whitney opens her keynote. She explains: “In an era where we need co-creativity, Appreciative Inquiry just fits very well. Leaders nowadays worry about questions like: ‘How do I engage our people? And our customers?’, ‘How do I build bridges?’ AI helps with exactly those questions.”

“A quote from one of my teachers that I always remembered is: “Learn to live and work in the energetically positive. Understand and do what gives life to the people.” And that to me is exactly what AI is about: we focus on those things that enhance energy, vitality, wellbeing to a system.”

Leadership is very important to the AI process. To Diana, “Leadership is a story of why things happen, (or not)… It is not about a person.” She has the audience reflect on leadership in AI processes and key elements that characterized it. After a few minutes of buzzing, she collect some of the words.  “Letting go of egos, trust, being AI, …” She embraces the words that the audience comes up with: “It is important to continually enrich our vocabulary of leadership.”

Diana and her colleagues have done research into the behaviour of leaders of successful AI initiatives. They found four common denominators:

• Leaders engage with other members of their organisation or community to create a better way. With being a key word here…
• People are surprised by their own learning and changing in the process. Diana; “They typically say: I thought it would change the people. I never thought that I would learn so much myself!”
• They care for people, profit and planet.
• Leaders practice and believe in the power of positive attitudes, emotions, intentions and images. To illustrate, Diana shares a story of a father who taught his daughter how to drive, by constantly using positive image: ‘Now is a good time to move your car to the middle of the lane.’ (instead of: ‘get away from the curb!’)

She captures it in a nutshell: “To me, appreciative leadership is the relational capacity to unleash the creative potential of a group and turn it into a positive power, by which you make a difference in the world.”

Leadership of an AI process requires several capabilities. I’ll list a few highlights here.

Perhaps first and foremost: the wisdom of inquiry. Diana: “Powerful questions set the process in motion. Typically, those are questions that are value based: what do you value and want to see more of in this organisation or our world.”

The genius of inclusion is equally important. As a rule of thumb Diana indicates: “Everyone whose future it concerns, needs to have a voice in creating that future.“ Leadership means including those people. Even if that creates challenges. She relates of an AI summit for a school of deaf and blind children, where not only the teachers, parents, support staff, local politicians, but also guide dogs and sign interpreters were all involved. And leaves the audience with a question to ponder: “Have you included everyone? Who are the voiceless and invisible in your organisation and community? And how can you invite them in the process?”

Focusing on strengths is another trait she explores. Stressing the advice to keep it  relational. “If you use tests, like the VIA or strengthsfinder, they work excellently to provide language. If people then talk about those strengths together, relate it to actual situations and stories, and look at each other’s strengths, the constructive process flows… Otherwise, such test results are just ‘labels’.” Her encouragement is to work on discovering strengths in small-scale interviews. Inviting everyone to become a talent-spotter, using their own words.

She calls it the art of illumination. “Through what lens do we look at people and events? Are we generous in interpreting what we see? Do we do ‘positive gossip’? And look at things hrough a lense of awe and wonder?” If we do, Diana contends, opportuinities increase and positive emotions and comments flourish.

A final one to point out is the importance of integrity. “Leadership is making decisions that serve the greater whole. It is not about you as an individual, or even a group. How do your actions benefit the greater system? Everything is interrelated. Working from that kind of consciousness is essential to appreciative leadership.”

And so, whom should take this list to heart? Only the project leaders or the CEOs of this world? To Diana, quite the opposite: ‘everyone has an influence, so we are all leaders’.

A message well picked up by the audience. Even though it was the end of the day, the people in the large room were brimming with energy. A tweet from @JokevA sums it up nicely:  ‘AI leadership = understand and do what gives life to the people.’

Saskia Tjepkema

• The book ‘Appreciative Leadership’ by Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Bloom and Kae Rader can be found here.
• The webcast of Diana’s keynote can be found here.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention.

But you should certainly do your own thinking. I recommend that you start by examining this past year…

2011 Was The Year of Social Media

2011 was a tough year for many in talent management, but despite compressed budgets, organizations continued to hire and develop talent. One factor that seemed to invade nearly every high-level functional discussion was social media. It’s clear that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will play a dominate role in recruiting and development best practices in years to come.

Not surprisingly, 2011 saw no fewer than 40 new vendors emerge to help organizations use social media to attract referrals. We also started to see early stage tools to use social media in talent assessment (pre/post hire) as well as applicant/candidate/employee experience management. New tools brought much enhanced visibility into talent issues, but most talent-management metrics continue not to resonate with key leaders outside of the HR function.

2012 Will Be “The Year of the Mobile Platform”

By the end of next year, even the skeptics will have to admit that the mobile platform will have become the dominant communications and interaction platform by early-adopting best-practice organizations. The capabilities afforded users of smartphones and tablet devices grows immensely day by day. Long before unified inboxes existed for the desktop, smart device users could see all incoming e-mail, social messaging, text messaging, and voice and video messaging in a single place.

Tablets will become the virtual classroom, and an emerging class of tools will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional life digitally. During the next year, talent management leaders need to invest heavily supporting execution of talent management initiatives across mobile.

The Additional Top Nine!

Intense hiring competition will return in selected areas — global economic issues will persist for years to come, but the global war for talent will continue spiking in key regions an industries. While growth has slowed somewhat in China, Australia and Southeast Asia — including India — continue to see dramatic demand for skilled talent. In the U.S. and Europe, demand is still largely limited to certain industries where skills shortages have been an issue for years.

In high tech inclusive of medical technologies, 2012 will see a significant escalation in the war for top talent. As innovators and game changers step out of established tech firms like Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Zynga, a whole new breed to tech startups will be born each vying for the best of the best. While recruiting will move forward at a breathtaking pace, so too will “rapid” leadership development.

Retention issues will increase dramatically — almost every survey shows that despite high engagement scores, more than a majority of employees are willing to quit their current job as soon as a better opportunity comes along. I am predicting that turnover rates in high-demand occupations will increase by 25% during the next year and because most corporate retention programs have been so severely degraded, retention could turn out to be the highest-economic-impact area in all of talent management.

Rather than the traditional “one-size-fits-all” retention strategy, a targeted personalized approach will be required if you expect to have a reasonable chance to retain your top talent.

Social media increases its impact by becoming more data-driven — most firms jumped on the social media bandwagon, but unfortunately the trial-and-error approach used by most has produced only mediocre results. Adapting social media tools from the business coupled with strong analytics will allow a more focused approach that harnesses and directs the effort of all employees on social media. Talent leaders will increasingly see the value of a combination of internal and external social media approaches for managing and developing talent.

Remote work changes everything in talent management — the continued growth of technology, social media, and easy communications now makes it possible for most knowledge work and team activities to occur remotely. Allowing top talent to work “wherever they want to work” improves retention and makes recruiting dramatically easier.

Unfortunately, even though it is now possible for as much as 50% of a firm’s jobs to be done remotely, manager and HR resistance has limited the trend. Fortunately, managers and talent management leaders have begun to realize that teamwork, learning, development, recruiting, and best-practice sharing can now successfully be accomplished using remote methods. Firms like IBM and Cisco have led the way in reducing and eliminating barriers to remote work.

The need for speed shifts the balance between development and recruiting — historically, best practice within corporations has been to build and develop primarily from within. However, as the speed of change in business continues to increase and the number of firms that copy the “Apple model” (where firm is continually crossing industry boundaries) increases, talent managers will need to rethink the “develop internally first” approach.

In many cases, recruiting becomes a more viable option because there simply isn’t time for current employees to develop completely new skills. As a result, the trend will be to continually shift the balance toward recruiting for immediate needs and the use of contingent labor for short-duration opportunities and problems.

Employee referrals are coupled with social media — the employee referral program in many organizations is operated in isolation as are the organizations’ social media efforts, but talent managers are beginning to realize that the real strength of social media is relationship-building by your employees.

With proper coordination, employee relationships can easily be turned into employee referrals. This realization will lead to a shift away from recruiters and toward relying on employees to build social media contacts and relationships. The net result will be that as many as 60% of all hires will come from the combined efforts. The strength of these relationships will lead to better assessment and the highest-quality hires from employee referrals.

Employer branding returns — Employer branding and building talent communities are the only long-term strategies in recruiting. True branding is rarely practiced (hint: it’s not recruitment marketing) especially in the cash-strapped function of today, but years of layoffs, cuts in compensation, and generally bad press for business in general may force firms to invest in true branding. The increased use of social media and frequent visits to employee criticism sites (like Glassdoor.com), make not managing employer brand perception a risky proposition. While corporations will never control their employer brand, they can monitor and influence in a direction that isn’t catastrophic to recruiting and retention.

The candidate experience is finally getting the attention it deserves — Organizations have never treated candidates as well as they did their customers, but the high jobless rate has allowed corporations to essentially abuse some applicants. As competition for talent increases and as more applicants visit employer criticism sites like Glassdoor.com, talent leaders will be forced to modify their approach.

At the very least, firms will more closely monitor candidate experience metrics as they realize that treating applicants poorly can not only drive away other high-quality applicants but it can also lose them sales and customers.

Forward-looking metrics begin to dominate — Almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Other business functions like supply chain, production, and finance have long championed the use of “forward-looking” or predictive metrics and the time is finally coming when talent management leaders will shift their metrics emphasis. Forward-looking metrics can not only improve decision-making but they can also help to prevent or mitigate future talent problems.

Other Things to Keep Your Eye On…

In addition to the major trends highlighted above, there are 12 additional “hot” topics to keep your eye on:

• Risk identification — almost every other business function has already adopted a risk management strategy. So the time is coming when talent management will be forced to adopt a similar strategy and set of metrics. This program will not only cover HR legal issues but also the economic “risk” associated with weak hiring, the absence of developed leaders, and the cost of turnover of key talent.
• Prioritization — continued budget and resource pressure will force talent management leaders to prioritize their services, business units, key jobs, and high-value managers/employees.
• Integration — there will be increasing pressure for talent management functions to more closely integrate and work seamlessly.
• Expedited leadership development — as more baby-boom leaders and managers actually begin to retire, there will be increased pressure for expedited leadership development — specifically solutions that develop talent remotely using social media tools and within months rather than years.
• Competitive analysis — the increasingly competitive business world has forced almost every function to be more externally focused. Although HR has a long history of being internally focused and not being “highly competitive,” there is increasing pressure to become more business-like and to adopt an “us-versus-them” perspective. That means conducting competitive analysis and making sure that every key talent management function produces superior results to those at competitors.
• Contingent workers — as continuous business volatility becomes the “new normal,” the increased use and the improved management of contingent workers will become essential for agility and flexibility.
• Unionization — there is a reasonable chance that actions by the NLRB will increase union power and make it easier for unions to gain acceptance at private employers.
• Recruiting at industry events — as industry events return to popularity, recruiting at them will again become an effective tool for recruiting top and diverse talent.
• Location software — talent managers will begin to realize that software that allows you to check-in and see who is within close geographic proximity has great value and many still unidentified uses.
• Hire before they do — most firms will restrict their hiring until the turnaround actually begins. However, your firm must have a talent pool or pipeline developed, so that you can hire immediately and capture the top talent right before your competitors realize the downturn is over.
• Assessment continues to improve — vendors, software, and tools continue to improve in this area that will become increasingly important.
• Increase your revenue impact — increased economic pressures will continue the trend of forcing all functions (including talent management) to convert their functional results into business impacts in dollars. Talent management will face increasing pressure to directly demonstrate how their hiring, retention, development, etc. is focused, so that it directly increases and maximizes corporate revenues.

Final Thoughts

A recent survey of CEOs rates talent management as the No. 1 area where CEOs expect dramatic change during the next year. Given this increased attention, it’s even more critical that talent management and recruiting leaders set aside time to conduct a SWOT assessment (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify where they are and where they need to be.

The “new” talent management leader must be more strategic, more proactive, and more business-like, and that means getting your entire staff to begin thinking about and planning for the game-changing events, trends, and opportunities that will occur during the next year. It’s time to realize the “but-we-are-overwhelmed-and-too-busy” excuse for not forecasting and planning is wearing thin.

We know – it’s early – but face it: most of 2011 is already in the rear-view mirror, and not much is going to change between now and the holidays.

2012 will come as an opportunity to start working on positive growth.

Check out some early 2012 predictions from a leader in HR Management Software, Acumen Data Systems.

Read the bulleted version below or view the free full version (no registration required) to learn more.

1) Businesses Seek to Regain Positive HR Image

• Improving Morale Following Years of HR Cost Reduction Measures
• Meaningful Raises
• More Perks & Benefits
• Focus on Employee Retention

2) Green Initiatives Still on Hold

• “Green” not Recession-proof
• Automation Encouraged
• Exceptions – IT

3) Digital-Age Reality Sets-in

• Flexible Scheduling
• Scheduling Study
• Employee Morale
• HR Automation
• Increase Productivity

4) Analysis via HR Metrics to Address Performance

• HR Technology
• Analytic Tools
• Spot Negative Trends
• Job Tracking Software

5) HR Technology Meets the Small Business

• Increasing Technology, Efficiency
• Automating Processes
• No More Manual Recording
• Save Time and Money
• Integrate Time Clocks & HR Software

6) Increasing Efficiency of Business Processes

• What You Need, When it’s Needed
• Reducing Mistakes
• Job Tracking Software

7) HR Shared Services Gains Steam

• Consolidate HR Costs
• Automate Processes
• Save Money
• Benefits of HR Shared Services

Final Thoughts: Navigating Towards Automation, Efficiency, and Positive Growth

• Build Efficient Processes
• Retaining Employees
• Increase Automation
• Start Your Preparations Now