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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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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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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Three Ways To Check More Than Just Boxes When Adding Diversity to Your Organization
Immigrating to the U.S. as a child gives you an entirely new perspective on what it means to add diversity to an organization.
People talk a lot about diversity — sometimes so much that I wonder if we still remember why. When leaders assemble diverse teams, the conflicting understandings of normalcy can lead to some friction — but as long as people are open-minded to the idea that their normal is not the only possibility, that friction can yield great results. A multifaceted, multicultural team can deliver some very unique and creative solutions in the workplace.
But when leaders hire people for their diversity simply to meet some standards of compliance, they might end up with more than just healthy friction. Unless these hires understand the benefits of bringing together diverse minds for more creative innovation, they may also bring conflict into a team.
Diversity should do more than check off boxes for your corporate diversity requirement; inclusivity for decision-making roles should go beyond basic divisions. Immigrants, like myself, know that diversity of class and culture can bring many benefits to a collaborative effort. To do diversity better, we need to go back to the source of its importance-bringing more diverse perspectives to work together and generate better ideas for business and society.
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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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