The Importance Of Aligning Your Personal And Professional Mission Statements
If your personal mission doesn’t align with your company mission, your days with that company will likely be limited. I’ve seen it unfold like clockwork in my time in corporate leadership – you can only sacrifice yourself and your values for so long. A company’s mission statement outlines the company’s business. It illuminates a goal and defines a strategy for reaching that goal. It points to both the current status of the company and where it is going. Having these statements clearly lined out provides employees with a specific goal to attain, promoting efficiency and productivity. But what about your personal mission statement?
Do You Have A Personal Mission Statement?
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Are You Tired of Losing Valuable Employees? Here’s How to Train and Build Leaders From Within Your Team
Creating a leadership pipeline within an organization can save a company — here’s how to do it.
Losing good people is expensive. In 2017, Gallup estimated replacing one employee to cost anywhere from half to double that person’s annual salary. That translates to between $660,000 to $2.6 million per year for a 100-person organization with an average salary of $50,000.
That costly burden makes it even harder to survive in a competitive labor market, and today’s market is more competitive than ever. According to a 2020 study by Crayon, a market and competitive intelligence tools supplier, 90% of businesses surveyed feel the market has become more competitive; 48% of respondents said it had become “much more” competitive. Add in an exhausted workforce and fears of recession, and most companies today would struggle to survive the loss of good people.
Company founders and executives depend on their leadership teams for stability. While we as leaders try our best to build loyalty and engagement to keep them, we also need a plan if it ever comes down to having to replace them. Record-breaking quit rates are only finally starting to slow down. Considering how costly and difficult it is to attract and recruit high-quality talent to replace those who leave, everyone should aim to train and recruit leaders from within. This way, we not only offer them a reason to stay with our company, but we also develop their talent and potential contribution to it.
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What makes a good mentor?
There’s a reason 100 percent of Fortune 50 companies have mentorship programs. Successful companies know mentorship programs do more than benefit the individual participants; mentorship relationships work to deepen and strengthen individual contributions to the company.
Here’s how leaders can identify and nurture potential mentors in their teams.
WHO BENEFITS FROM MENTORSHIP?
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The Importance Of True Leadership As We Face Recession
In the face of any crisis, true leadership is essential to stabilize an organization and maintain the morale of the people who keep it running.
A pandemic, labor shortages, broken supply chains and inflation on the rise—the past few years have carried us from crisis to crisis. This chain of events has rocked our foundation. Now, just as we start to feel back on somewhat solid ground, we face the potential of a recession.
Challenging times call for true leadership to stabilize an organization and maintain the morale of the people who work to keep it going. True leaders step up and help their teams navigate difficult times so they can emerge even stronger. When facing a recession, that leadership is more important than ever.
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Diversity Is Not the Same to Everyone. Here’s Why That Matters
If companies want to reap the benefits of diversity in its truest form, it’s time to consider diversifying it.
I know I’m not the typical picture of diversity. However, growing up in communist Poland offered me a unique approach to problems and solutions that most businesspeople I meet today never consider. Diversity of thought — combining our differences to cover as many diverse perspectives as possible in our decision-making — is where companies find the most benefits.
While diversity and inclusion of traditionally marginalized groups are important, being truly diverse takes more thought than people realize. To truly experience greater diversity, we need to eliminate bias, go beyond what diversity looks like and choose the people that bring something new to the table.
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Four Strategies For Your Board To Expedite Company Growth
Most organizations have a board of directors to provide governance, but an advisory board is optional and members have less liability, so they can more readily offer advice. These boards serve different purposes, but both can also propel a company to success. A well-curated board of experienced members can fill in all of the areas where your company needs expertise. When properly chosen, a board can drive more growth.
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How immigrants can turn their challenges into business strengths
As of 2019, 13.7% of the United States’ population was foreign-born—but as researcher Peter Vandor noted in Harvard Business Review, immigrants make up approximately 25% of startup founders. Just as emigrating and starting life in a strange country involves taking big risks, so does starting a company—and many immigrants see both paths as equally viable, Vandor found, because of an innate higher tolerance for risk.
Working Harder And Smarter During Tough Times
The pandemic, supply chain crises, a possible recession—you might think we’re passing through particularly difficult times, but we’ve passed through difficult times before. At any point, a major event could hit and throw your life and business out of whack. When this happens, you can’t just drop everything and give up. Leaders have no choice but to keep working through challenges if they want to succeed. The stronger you remain, the better you’ll come out of it.
In our current climate of uncertainty and oncoming challenges, my advice is always the same: Even when work gets hard, work harder.
Overcoming adversity can make you stronger.
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Creative Work Is Best Done As A Team
I encourage leaders to drive greater creativity and innovation by encouraging teamwork at all company levels.
I’m a firm believer in not doing everything myself. After 25 years at the C-level, there have been many times when I ended up taking on tasks on my own, but it’s often more of a struggle to operate that way. I prefer to tackle creative work with the help of a supportive and diverse-minded team.
In a world where competition has increasingly become a game of generating the best and most ideas, the best creative work is often done in teams. Therefore, I encourage leaders to drive greater creativity and innovation by encouraging teamwork at all company levels.
Teamwork Boosts Creative Thinking
The old saying, “Birds of a feather flock together,” perfectly illustrates our tendency to seek out people with similar perspectives, but this can dampen creative thinking. Harvard economics professor Richard Freeman noticed the tendency of scientists to work with those who were similar to them. Chinese scientists in one lab, Indians and Europeans in two others. He analyzed the publications put out by similar-minded scientists and found that papers with more diverse groups of authors received more public citations and prestige. Diverse input is a strength.
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Being A CEO Requires Creativity: Three Tips For Building A Creative Environment
These days, it seems we find a new crisis around every corner. The pandemic, broken supply chains and, now as we approach 2023, some experts are predicting an oncoming recession. But on the opposite side of uncertainty is innovation and the foundation of every disruptive decision. Leaders who can be creative, adaptable and open-minded in the face of uncertainty will be the ones who take advantage of those opportunities.
While today’s CEOs highly benefit from creativity, that doesn’t mean only creative CEOs can be successful in an uncertain climate. Anyone with a foundation for great leadership—meaning they’re organized, dedicated and open-minded—can surround themselves with creative counterparts to pass ideas by. This allows the less-creative executive the opportunity to build the environment they need to innovate and stay competitive, even during times of uncertainty.
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