PrimeGenesis Blog
For a Successful Job Search: Solve Someone’s Problem
The surest way to get a new job is to solve someone’s problem. Follow these three steps:
Focus on the other someone – your target audience
Get at their unsolved problem
Be the best solution – and help them understand that
Lessons In Complementary Leadership From Disney And Coca-Cola
Most leaders are unbalanced. They are relatively stronger in some areas than others. The secret to making them more productive is to let them play to their strengths, while at the same time bringing in someone to work with them that has complementary strengths.
You can figure out most businesses by looking at how its plans, people and practices align around a shared purpose. Business leaders tend to have relative strengths in the strategic area (plans), organizational area (people), or operational area (practices). If you’re like most, here’s our prescription:
If you are relatively stronger in strategy and organization, find a complementary chief operating officer to manage the operations.
If you are relatively stronger in strategy and operations, find a complementary chief human resource officer to help lead the organization.
If you are relatively stronger in organization and operations, find a complementary chief strategy officer to help lead strategy.
If you are one of the few who are actually balanced, find a chief of staff to give you leverage.
There’s a strong argument to be made that it’s better to be unbalanced. If you’re balanced and bring people in to give you leverage, you probably think you can do any one of their jobs. They’ll know that and resent you for it.
What Facebook Must Do To Transfer Acquired Karma’s Karma
The hard side of Facebook’s acquisition of Karma, the data transfer, is relatively easy. The soft side is harder and where Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg et al need to focus their best efforts if they want to take full advantage of Karma developers’ mobile experience sensitivities. Karma without its Karma is valuable. But Karma’s Karma can take Facebook to a whole different level – if they can transfer it.
The organizations’ leaders must create something new together. The game in this case is about building a network of productive relationships. This is going to require thoughtful alignment of values and strengths. Everyone involved is going to need to invest in getting to know each other.
Don’t Lead Until You Have Earned the Right to Lead in a New Job
“About 40% of executives who change jobs or get promoted fail in the first 18 months.” As Anne Fisher points out in a recent Fortune article, this has been true for about 15 years
A big reason for the ongoing failure rate is the inability of executives to determine the right time to pivot from converging (becoming part of the team) to evolving (initiating change) when they are onboarding, changing jobs or getting promoted – and the inability of others to help them get this timing right.
Let’s unpack that into three musts for executives:
Must adopt a converge and evolve approach to onboarding
Must make a conscious choice about pivoting from converging to evolving
Must time that pivot right
Understand that while there are certainly some situations where it’s right to shock a system or simply assimilate in, in the vast majority of cases, converging and evolving is the right approach. New leaders cannot lead until they have established a working relationship with their followers. Hence, converge and evolve.
Leading Those That Would Undermine Your Leadership
The number one thing experienced leaders regret is not moving faster on people. Even so, many leaders are reluctant to make early people moves for fear of upsetting the apple cart. But upsetting the apple cart is better than letting rot spread from apple to apple. Do three things:
Identify potential underminers.
Invite them to join in the change and give them support, encouragement and time to sign up.
Move them off the team if they don’t want to be a part of it.
New Ideas in Onboarding Thought Leadership
Here are the three main takeaways for organizations and leaders:
Deploy a systemic integrated approach to onboarding – Get key stakeholders aligned before starting to recruit, and then integrate recruiting, hiring, operational, assimilation and management practices;
Personalize onboarding efforts – Match the level of support to the risks and complexity inherent in the organizational and personal transition;
Leaders must earn the right to lead – Even with onboarding support, leaders moving into new roles must remember, and must be helped to remember, not to lead until they have earned that right.
The business case for onboarding is proven. Reducing the 40 percent failure rate for new leaders and accelerating their time to productivity are doable. Thus, shame on organizations that are not using at least some of the available tools to do so.
The Cure for Incompetent Onboarding
The conscious competence model applies:
– Unconscious Competence: Have the knowledge and the skills. (Can make music.)
– Conscious Competence: Have the knowledge, but not the skills. (Know how to play notes. Can’t quite make them flow.)
– Conscious Incompetence: Know enough to know you have neither knowledge, nor skills. (Very uncomfortable state.)
– Unconscious Incompetence: Don’t know enough to know what knowledge or skills you need. (Ignorance is bliss.)
Intentional Leaders Are Not Victims of Circumstance
The point is that the actions or reactions of a leader should be intentional. Choose to go in harm’s way. Choose to influence history. Choose to look after your followers. If you choose to defend your home or play aggressively, own up to your intentions, apologize when you go too far. But be an intentional leader, not a victim of circumstance.
To Be One of the “Best Places to Work,” Build a BRAVE Culture
In February, St. Joseph Hospital was named one of the “Best Places to Work in Indiana” for the sixth consecutive year. Hospital President Kathy Young firmly believes that it is St. Joseph’s “corporate culture that has made this achievement possible.” It has built a...
A BRAVE New Approach to Finding a Job
If what you’re currently doing to find a job isn’t yielding the results you want, adjust your efforts by asking yourself these five questions:
Where play? (Environment)
What matters? (Values)
How win? (Attitude)
How connect? (Relationships)
What impact? (Behaviors)
Some of you will recognize this framework. BRAVE was originally developed to assess an organization’s culture by looking at behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values and environment, and was later applied to leadership. It works as a job search or job creation approach as well in the form of these five specific questions: