If You Want to Be a Good Leader, Understand The Link Between Business Values and Leadership
Let’s look at two different lessons about leadership and corporate values:
In 1982, Johnson and Johnson (J&J) discovered that someone had contaminated their Tylenol Extra Strength capsules in at least half a dozen Chicago pharmacies and grocery stores. Because of their corporate values committed to public safety, J&J leadership responded immediately: warned customers to stop consuming it, halted advertising and removed all Tylenol from store shelves until they could determine the extent of the tampering.
In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig platform exploded, and its owner, British Petroleum (BP), realized it had a leak. Company officials first reported the leak volume was low, but when the rig sunk days later and eleven workers died, investigations into BP’s practices found they took shortcuts, cut corners and ignored early warning signs. Its leadership was dishonest from the get-go, and to recover, the company had to revisit and update its corporate values.
Business values are the guiding principles that shape an organization’s culture and inform its decisions and actions. Good leadership, in turn, is essential for aligning an organization’s actions with its values and creating a positive and productive culture.
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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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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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How to Stay Calm in a Crisis and Lead Your Team Through Anything
Calmness is the key to leading through a crisis — leaders who stay calm can get their teams through anything.
The pandemic brought a wave of global uncertainties: supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, inflation, rising prices and an oncoming recession. Crisis after crisis has characterized the 2020s.
When facing so much uncertainty, it can be easy to worry about the future. That worry often then becomes doubt, which can quickly spiral into panic. And when we panic, we usually rush. But try to take a step back and think of your last rushed decision that ended up being a good one; panic is never a good foundation for making healthy decisions. Calmness, on the other hand, is the key to leading others through a crisis. Leaders who can stay calm can get their teams through anything.
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How to Best Recruit Board Members Outside of Your Industry
The value of board members from outside your industry cannot be understated – here’s why.
ew individuals are experts in everything. Even the cumulative expertise in most businesses could use input from more experts in diverse areas. This is why we have boards — a panel of experts in areas that fill in the gaps in our existing company knowledge base.
But even once we find the right group of experts from our industry to take a seat on our board, we would still stand to benefit from the wisdom of more diverse perspectives and experiences. Their range of successes and failures becomes additional resources to put together more tried and tested strategies in the face of new challenges.
Outside board members can bring a lot to a company, but to find the right ones for the job, we need to know what to look for:
Related: How Board Members Can Help You Through a Recession
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How Board Members Can Help You Through a Recession
With recession looming, having a strong board is now more important than ever.
First, COVID-19. Then, health mandates. Add in choked-up supply chains, the Russia-Ukraine war, rising prices, interest rates, and inflation. Economists are starting to unite around the prediction — a recession is inevitable.
No one has a crystal ball, and the future seems more uncertain than ever, but if we break these problems down (e.g., pandemics, war, and rising food and fuel prices leading to a recession), we realize that many of us have lived through similar challenges before. Either we made it out on the other side alive and thriving, or we made mistakes and learned what not to do. These insights are valuable for getting through this next round of uncertainty.
Alone, a business owner can see issues from a limited amount of angles. Especially as first-time leaders, it can be hard to think outside the box with little experience to reference. But, with a board, its members’ expertise can help in more informed decision-making. Leaders can lean into the diverse range of expertise their board members have — their “been there, done that’s” — to tackle challenges and opportunities better and get their company through even the toughest of times, including the oncoming recession.
Related: Building a Better Board: 5 Things Every New Board Member Should Know
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Finding the Right Board Members for Your Company is Crucial to Success. Here’s How to Do it.
Finding the right board members for your company is an important task. Here’s what to consider.
Once upon a time, a new startup rushed through the process of bringing board members into their company. Its leaders were young and inexperienced. They went through the process without third-party guidance or a deep dive interview with candidates. They met smooth-talking members looking to be partners and were sold on something grand, but what the candidates delivered was the total opposite.
The partners’ experience was less than they let on. Their mission, vision and values were out of alignment with those of the existing members. Things quickly started to fall apart and the startup founders suffered through years of pain before the company eventually dissolved.
I’ve heard this story many times in my job guiding board formation. So many leaders lament that fewer mistakes would have been made if they had just had connections to more of the right people who matched up with their company’s core values, ambitions and guidance to vet those candidates.
“But none of that happened,” they tell me. “We signed papers and got screwed.”
Not many founders consider their board’s composition, but taking the time and care to cultivate a board of inside and outside perspectives across diverse experiences can be a company’s number one predictor of success. Building a board is a big deal for your company’s success and must be done correctly. Here’s how to do it right.
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The Time for Outside Board Members is Now
Outside board members are the x-factor that will propel your company out of times of crisis.
Outside board members have always been a necessity, but today they are more important than ever. When a company can turn to a board with a broad diversity of insights and with members from outside the company, they receive guidance that can be the advantage they need to survive tough times. Nowadays, it seems like times are only getting tougher.
As problems increasingly have global repercussions, every decision we make could make or break a business. Outside board insights have always been a necessary consideration for staying agile and strengthening decision-making power, but now, those insights are becoming indispensable. To be more in an uncertain future, bring on outside board members for a broader selection of expertise to fill a company’s gaps and the best chance of coming through anything on top.
Related: Why E-Commerce Businesses Need to Rethink Their Channel Strategy
Look outside your company for the best fit
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How Your Board Should Guide Your Hiring Practices
“The Great Resignation” does not seem to be letting up any time soon, so take advice from your board in order to revamp your hiring practices to retain and recruit strong employees.
Just as the remote work trend brought on by the pandemic never seemed to go away, “The Great Resignation” is starting to seem like a permanent shift in today’s business landscape. People left in masses and moved on to better pay, more perks and greater flexibility — and are unlikely to give this trend up any time soon.
For a company to keep up with the changing face of business, its leaders need to be frequently evaluating their company hiring practices to recruit, attract and retain the right employees for the job. This can take a lot of time strategizing that CEOs may not always have to spare while running a business. For support in uncovering otherwise overlooked areas to maximize advantages in hiring, leaders should turn to their boards to guide them.
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These 4 Elements Are Key to Branding Your Business
In today’s world of rapid startup growth, branding your company is essential to stand out from your competitors and find success.
Competition in business today is tough, yet more and more businesses are entering the arena than ever before. While many companies never make it through their first five years, some hit it big overnight. There’s a treasure trove of wealth to be made for those of us who know how to unlock it, but times have changed, and these are unprecedented business waters.
With more avenues to reach consumers than ever before and more businesses starting up every day, all brands know they have competitors out there, but they can still take steps to stand out.
To rise above the rest, a clearly articulated and targeted brand identity is key. Here’s how to do it right:
1. Brand everything
Remember that just as important as branding your particular product or service is branding everything that goes along with it. Think about how your brand can define every aspect of your company’s identity. On your website, make sure your call to action is appropriately branded. Make sure your blog posts or social media branding all flows in line with the same branding inspiration. Especially when you put money into your company, make sure that every investment is going to be worth it for your brand identity in the long run.
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