mwmcdonaldandassociates

How to Develop Your Skills for Innovation

Tue, 20 Feb 2018 22:47:38 GMT

Innovation is in our DNA - Unleash it within your organization

In a recent study, innovation was ranked a long-term challenge for driving business growth. It is a key talent needed at all levels of leadership, starting with the CEO. Despite its importance, innovation is a difficult quality to cultivate in both leaders and organizations. As a leader, what if you feel you’re not innovative?

Creating an innovative mindset takes work and may require some retraining, but anyone can innovate if they develop these core competencies:

Seek out innovative environments

Our environment plays a major part in developing our innovative characteristics. We can’t change the circumstances of our upbringing, but we do have a choice in the kinds of people with whom we associate and surround ourselves with today. Develop new friends who will truly nourish the desire to become more innovative in our thinking. Likewise, spend time with colleagues who possess high levels of innovative traits.

Observe and be curious

Innovative leaders score high in curiosity. They desire to know more and take the initiative to learn new information. They keep their skills and knowledge current to give them a competitive edge. Innovative leaders see possibilities everywhere and constantly add new information as they learn more. They are curious about other people and come up with many of their own innovative ideas as they observe others.

Pinpoint self-fulfilling prophecies

We all have self-limiting beliefs about ourselves that often lead to self-fulfilling prophecies about what we can and cannot achieve in life. We can place limitations around ourselves when we predict the outcome of a situation.

Shake things up

Innovative leaders scored 25% higher than non-innovative counterparts in managing risk. Innovation requires us to make something out of nothing. It requires the grit to keep working at something until you find a solution. When you shake things up and embrace risk, one of two things will happen: You will succeed at meeting your goal, or you will succeed in getting an education.

Seize opportunities

Innovative leaders take risks, and when they do, they seize opportunities. Because they are also careful observers, they change direction when the advantage becomes apparent. Innovative leaders can anticipate potential obstacles and are not surprised when they pop up. They are prepared for them and are able to pivot and move forward, without losing valuable momentum. Innovation is a mindset. As such, you work to create a mindset that seeks ways to move around obstacles.

If you are a talented individual, you can fake your way through the learning process until it becomes a genuine skill you own.

Talent is an Organization's Most Powerful and Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 22:43:44 GMT

Finding the best talent is a leader's most important task

As leaders face the most volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous business conditions ever, one thing is clear: improving the talent pipeline by attracting, developing and retaining the best possible employees is among a leader’s most fundamental priorities. Here are some things to consider:

You are in the best possible position to source new talent.

Attracting top talent can no longer be an activity that’s delegated to HR. Local leaders are the ones closest to the needs and creative in terms of where they seek out talent. Rather than mining the same tired sources as their competitors, they look in novel places and identify those who aren’t necessarily the “usual suspects.” And when they do that, they contribute powerfully to a rich and sustainable talent pipeline.

Your actions contribute directly to the employment brand we project in the marketplace.

Increasingly, leaders are coming to appreciate that the company’s employment brand may be as important as the brand reflected to customers. And that brand is the cumulative effect of the culture, behaviors, and policies that affect employees. Building an effective employment brand – one that will attract the best and the brightest – begins with cultivating the right impressions in the marketplace, and those impressions must also come to life and create a congruent experience for people who choose to join the organization.

It’s your job to anticipate and understand talent needs and gaps — not just in one department or group but throughout the organization.

Effective leaders are constantly scanning the environment to understand how changing business conditions will affect the work of their group. They look at economic, environmental, demographic, political and other factors to plan for the future. Highly effective leaders also use this information to anticipate and begin taking early steps toward attracting the talent that will be needed for that new future. They recruit and hire today with tomorrow in mind.

You have a responsibility to continuously improve organizational processes to support the talent pipeline.

Attracting and retaining the talent it needs to thrive is no longer the purview of HR alone. Leaders can provide the in-the-trenches perspectives, and these perspectives can inform improvements of the organization’s competitive advantage

Are competitors offering new benefits that are luring candidates and employees away?
Are unnecessarily protracted verification processes causing your best candidates to accept other offers?
Are opportunities for advancement not sufficiently transparent to capture the imagination of prospective employees?

Regardless the nature of your business, people are the key to driving results. And leaders must play a central role in attracting, recruiting and ultimately hiring the people required to ensure a free-flowing talent pipeline.

Crossing the Chasm of Leadership Succession – Are You Ready?

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 22:37:41 GMT

What's in your Leadership Talent Pipeline?

“High Potentials”, those talented young leaders in your organization, are those you must groom to ensure the future success of your company. According to a survey by the Center for Creative Leadership, over 50% of companies have a formal “high potential” leadership program. An additional 35% acknowledge an informal development process for up-and-coming leaders. Regardless of how your company develops promising leaders, there are steps executives can take to make certain your company has ample senior leadership candidates in the pipeline.

Here are three tips to help you make the most of your leadership development efforts:

Start the development process early. As with many business processes, the leadership development cycle has shortened. Gone are the days when aspiring leaders could progress through a series of extended front-line leadership assignments, gathering valuable experience over the course of many years. Experts indicate that the cycle time for developing executives has been cut in half, to about 15 years. This means that your current leadership should look to employees in their late 20s and early 30s to identify those with the talent to take on greater levels of responsibility.

Help them map their careers. One of the most effective ways to engage your high-potentials is also one of the easiest: sit down with them and have a conversation about their careers. The Center for Creative Leadership study found that the No. 1 answer to “What could your organization do to increase your engagement and commitment?” was “Provide career pathing and support.” Don’t assume that your high-achieving employees know exactly how to progress in their job growth — even though they’re talented, they still need coaching. And they also need to hear that their contributions matter.

Encourage high-potentials to coach their peers. Over 80% of employees described as “high-potential” leaders say they actively look for ways to identify and develop other high-potential employees. Companies can capitalize on this “leaders helping other leaders succeed” approach with a peer coaching model.

Leadership development plays a critical role in helping an organization “Cross the Chasm” of leadership succession by filling that elusive leadership pipeline.

What keeps you up at night?

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 22:33:36 GMT

Salinas Valley Growers doing what they do best - Growing their future leaders

Bruce Taylor serves as chairman and CEO of Taylor Farms, headquartered in America’s lettuce bowl, Salinas, Calif. Taylor Farms has 14 facilities in North America. In a recent interview, he talked about human capital, innovation, leadership, and entrepreneurialism. When asked “what keeps him up at night” Mr. Taylor expressed what most business owners would probably agree is a topic for insomnia:

HUMAN CAPITAL: “Trying to figure out how to generate the human capital to keep growing. We have a very complicated business, and it has been difficult to find transferable industries where we can just re-pot someone. So, we tend to be homegrown leaders. “When you’re growing at 10%, 12% a year of a large base, you need a lot of new leaders, and that’s the challenge we’re finding right now.

SOLUTION: As an industry effort, the message really for college graduates is what used to be the produce business is now the food business. It’s a very sophisticated, high-tech business. People love the thought of growing and producing food for fellow Americans. They understand the challenges and the opportunities from a career perspective. What we try to do is spread our story so people understand that, at Taylor Farms, there are software jobs, there are engineering jobs, there are marketing jobs, there are social media jobs.”