“71% of the Millennial workforce saying they’re either not engaged, or actively disengaged in the workforce today” – Recent Gallup Report: How Millennials Want to Work and Live

Compared to the other generations there are actually fewer who are actively disengaged (16%) So 55% are in that middle group – just ‘not engaged’ and they’re turning up every day at work saying ‘show me’.

Not surprisingly ‘meaning & purpose’ topped the list. My experience working with young people is that they want to work for purpose-driven organizations, but also want to feel a connection to individual purpose and a sense of journey. They want to feel they can develop and move forward.

I’ve had the greatest pleasure working with Millennials and helping them to connect with visions of their success. I’m always told that they feel life is so fast, and they’re dealing with so much information that they rarely have the opportunity to take a step back and really explore what really matters to them, and what their success could look like.

Also from the report, opportunities to learn and grow is the number one most important thing to Millennials when they’re looking for job opportunities. 68% of them who’ve had opportunities to learn and grow with their current company plan to stay there another year, and 87% consider opportunities to learn and grow the most important aspect in looking at jobs.

Only 39% consider they’ve learnt something new, and slightly less than 1 in 2 believe they’ve had the opportunity to learn and grow in the past year. Only 1 in 3 who had the opportunity to learn and grow felt it was worth their time.

93% said the last time they changed roles they had to leave their employer, so it’s critical for employers help their Millennials understand that they don’t need to go somewhere else to keep developing.

Millennials are not Job Hoppers…

…if they’re engaged in the right ways, but there is a danger that employers will lose them if they don’t actively address the engagement issue.

Katie Pink

I’ve recently been working with Katie Pink from specialist Pharmaceutical recruiter Cranleigh Scientific. About 2 years ago we started working together on connecting her with a vision of her success, and we did this by projecting her to a successful point in the future using a vision board. She was then able to see clearly what mattered to her, and with the support of her Directors she was able to set some goals and KPIs for herself. They in turn were very supportive by creating an ‘intrapreneurial’ environment for her to do her job well, and made themselves accessible to her on the journey.

According to Gallup, 72% of Millennials who said their managers help them set performance goals are engaged, so they want to be clear about expectations, and they want to work collaboratively so they can own those expectations. They’re saying ‘don’t make me guess’ and ‘inspire me with what great looks like. Tell me who are the great performers’.

They want to understand what they do well, and what comes naturally to them, and to work out how to best achieve their goals using their strengths. They want to understand themselves so they can do great work.

Recently Katie got back in touch and told me she’d finally achieved the last couple of things on her vision board and was now ready for her next challenge. I knew immediately that unless she was inspired again with a new vision, there was a danger she’d start to feel she was going backwards, and this is precisely the time she could have started exploring opportunities elsewhere. Often managers can be oblivious to this and just assume that their staff are happy and motivated.

With a new vision board completed and renewed motivation, Katie’s looking forward to the new challenges and journey ahead.

So..

Millennials are not Job Hoppers if they’re engaged in the right ways – but there is a danger that employers will lose them if they don’t actively address the engagement issue.

6 in 10 are open to other job opportunities and plan to be with another employer 1 year from now.

6 functional changes

[change 1] Millennials don’t just work for a paycheck – they want a purpose

Work must have meaning – they want organizations with a mission & purpose.

[change 2] Millennials aren’t pursuing job satisfaction – they’re pursuing development

They’re not that fussed about the bells and whistles – they want purpose & development.

[change 3] Millennials don’t want bosses – they want coaches

They want bosses who will help them understand & build their strengths.

[change 4] Millennials don’t want annual reviews – they want conversations

They’re accustomed to constant communication & feedback, and want regular feedback, but don’t often ask for it – managers need to be more proactive with it.

They’ve grown up with continuous feedback in real time. Only 19% said they receive regular feedback and fewer say that was meaningful. Although only 15% agree they routinely ask for it, only 33% say they’ve told their manager what they need most to get their work done and why.

Millennials who are given regular feedback in the workplace are 2.2 times likely to be more engaged in the workforce. It can be email or text – it’s about the frequency of feedback.

Engagement is highest when they meet managers at least once a week – 56% meet their managers less than once a month and only 21% meet their managers on a weekly basis. Daily connects are ideal with quick texts and emails, not necessarily face to face meetings.

[change 5] Millennials don’t want to fix their weaknesses – they want to develop their strengths

Organisations need to maximise the strengths of their Millennials otherwise they won’t attract and keep their stars

Only 28% strongly agree that their manager’s focus on their strengths, but 70% say they’re engaged when their managers focus on their strengths

[change 6] It’s not just a job – It’s my life

Does this organization value my strengths? & and does it help me to do great work every day? – because it’s my life

Maybe it’s time now to address the engagement issue as it could become a very expensive problem, especially as the Millennials are expected to make up 75% of the workforce by 2025.

Airbnb’s Mark Levy, Head of Employee Experience said that their roadmap for development and internal mobility includes a programme called ‘Explorers’, where managers can offer up a 1-3 month assignment, in which employees with more than 2 years of tenure can try out something different – in another function or country.

This is a very good idea to engage and retain your Star Millennials.

View online: Engaging Millennial Stars

[unenviable example #1] I will never forget the workplace where I had to write down exactly what my manager said in a notebook and ask him to sign it before he would give me the information I actually needed to do my job! Otherwise he would always give partial information and pass blame for errors. This continued for two years!

[unenviable example #2] Or the workplace where I was told you could not talk to execs because they were too important to spend time with new hires.

[unenviable example #3] Or the workplace where our team was never allowed to work remote/from home by a boss who worked from their tropical beach home at least two months every year.

In the last decade, I’ve worked in a wide variety of workplaces: as an employee and consultant. I’ve had a few wonderful workplace experiences and many terrible ones. When it comes to the terrible experiences, there was one commonality: companies that were just too big to change.

So why are so many companies in 2016 still such terrible places to work?

Some of the great places I’ve worked really cared about the individual and collective experience of their employees. They removed outdated processes and kept as few levels of management as possible.

They helped employees:

• learn in the job
• coached you to greater heights
• rewarded creative thinking and innovative ideas
• didn’t worry that you might go work somewhere else

Great workplaces that I’ve experienced start with trusting their employees to do their best work (they hire them after all). Years ago, due to financial pressures, I was laid off from the very best place I’ve worked, Habanero Consulting Group – yet I would still would recommend it as an amazing to work and learn. They lived and breathed trying to keep a human, social workplace.

But too many companies talk a good talk when it comes to engagement, learning, collaboration and innovation… but they don’t live it. Thus, they remain outdated, intimidating places, wasting money on countless change initiatives. Instead of reaping the rewards of listening to their people, the initiatives add layers of unhelpful job complexity. Worst of all, they fail to put people first.

I’ve gained a handle on what it takes to shift a company from one that responds at the last minute to one that continually adapts. And now, with digital technology requiring adaptation, companies that don’t adapt won’t get full value from their tech investments. Your company benefits by doing what it preaches. But when finance takes precedence over people in corporate decision-making, very few are able to run a people-centric company.

More than just good values, research shows that companies with people-centric cultures have (among many other positive things): greater stock market returns, greater customer or client relations, better brand recognition, longer employee retention, far superior recruiting power, faster agility, higher returns on innovation, faster adoption of new technology.

Executive challenge: culture and adaptation must start at the top

When I talk about companies not getting this, or just paying lip service to ideas, I mean executives: CEOs, leadership teams, and their boards. This is the challenge you face in the people side of your business to gain those wonderful rewards I listed above:

How do you engage your employees with purpose, while speeding up their development, and going through continuous culture-based organisational redesign?

That is the huge challenge facing today’s C-Suite according to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016. If you want to rise above these challenges and trailblaze, don’t be too big to change.

You can’t meet these challenges repeating the same efforts as before. Companies are rife with outdated leadership and training practices, unrealistic or unrepresentative employer branding, and a lack of genuine purpose and vision inspiring the workforce.

Does your company keep trying the same things over and over again to engage employees without measurable results? If so, you’re not alone. The problem lies in the very basic building blocks of our companies – individuals and teams – and how our business culture harnesses their value. Work is about people. Companies are made of people. As management expert Tom Peters says in his 2003 book Re-Imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age:

“Business at its best is not dry and drab and dreary and by the numbers… It’s about people and energy and life and service and creativity.”

Your culture may need help changing to focus on people – especially as millennials will be by far the largest percentage of the workforce by 2025. We need companies to give energy and inspire creativity and innovation. As we wrote in a recent article, millennials need purpose to be engaged at work. But everyone needs purpose at work. Purpose drives culture and culture drives the experience and engagement of teams.

I believe there are three levels to a purpose-driven culture, that align well with the Deloitte report: individual, team, and company. You need all three firing to be a truly enviable workplace.

Organisational learning starts with you

The Deloitte report found that 84% of respondents thought organisational learning was either “important” or “very important”. According to the report, “companies are not developing skills fast enough or leaders deeply enough.” In particular, the report calls out the need for supporting self-directed learning. The Brandon Hall State of Leadership Development Study in 2015 found that only 20% of companies identified millennial leaders as critical for development in the next 24 months.

Taken together, we have a huge need to support the self-directed learning of the younger generations in the workforce. Companies need to inspire individuals to find purpose and build their learning networks inside and outside the company towards that purpose.

That means starting with the individual. Even with you.

• What meaning do you find in your work and why?
• How does this meaning drive your purpose for turning up every day at work and doing your best?
• Without a vision and purpose, how can employees take charge of their own learning?

If a your culture stifles ideas and sharing, it is not a learning culture. And technology won’t solve this problem, although it can help accelerate a genuine purpose-driven cultures.

Imagining purpose-driven teams in your organisational redesign

Organisational design is another hot topic from the Deloitte report:

After… years of struggling to drive employee engagement and retention, improve leadership, and build a meaningful culture, executives see a need to redesign the organisation.

But I don’t believe a top-down re-org is what is required. Instead, we need to get back to a focus on teams. Self-forming, collaborative, supported. A truly purpose-driven company would be a network of teams, all driven by that purpose. A focus on teams naturally means a reduction in excess hierarchy and other purpose and engagement killers. It’s nothing new either. Back in 2000, Strategy+Business published an article on Corporate Culture in Internet Time. It talks about the need of creating a culture of teams, with inter-team learning, different team cultures, and experimentation. We still haven’t got to a place where this exists widely in business.

With purpose-driven individuals, we can create and support purpose-driven teams. Social, collaborative, digitally expert, and experimental – the key features of creative, innovative, and productive teams. Great teams are peer learning havens in disengaged cultures. Imagine your company comprised solely of a network of purpose-driven, great teams. Suddenly, organisational redesign looks very different.

Company culture’s impact on retention

The recent stalwarts remain in the Deloitte report – “Engagement” and “Culture”. Culture can be a competitive advantage – yes. And importantly, according to the report, “employee engagement and retention today means understanding an empowered workforce’s desire for flexibility, creativity and purpose.” A culture of purpose – that’s what you build from the individual upwards.

CEOs and other executives need to model exactly what they hope to develop as their culture. As Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones write in Why Should Anyone Work Here?: “top management…need to be both cognitively and emotionally committed” to any changes. The trends highlighted in the Deloitte report are not ones to be “run” by HR, Comms, or Marketing, pushed onto the organisation without conversation and without executive modelling. A network of teams model helps all employees own the purpose and culture of a company.

Is [insert your company name here] an enviable workplace?

It’s just not the case that one company can copy the “successful” culture of another. Every company has a different cultural DNA that delivers a human and inspiring workplace.

For your company to be an enviable workplace, you need to consider how you can leverage individuals and teams to build a network of purpose-driven teams. Ditch the old change management methods and build something new. Don’t be too big to change.

View online: Culture Killer: Is Your Company Too Big to Change?

What’s your company’s purpose?

If all that comes to mind is “to maximise shareholder value”, you’re in trouble.

Purpose Facilitates Talent Recruitment & Retention

According to Deloitte’s Millennial Survey 2015, 60% of their 7,800 Millennial respondents (those born in 1982 or later) reported that they chose to join their current employer in part because of the organisation’s “sense of purpose”.

Among Millennials who were highly connected on social media – i.e., the online face of your organisation – the figure was 77%. In addition, 57% of respondents who perceived their organisation to have a “strong sense of purpose” reported a “high level of employee satisfaction” at their company, while only 23% of those who worked at an organisation that lacked a strong sense of purpose reported the same level of employee satisfaction.

So having a clear organisational purpose matters to Millennials, who will likely soon (or have) make up your organisation’s largest group of employees, and should be an important part of your organisation’s talent acquisition and retention strategy.

When It Comes to Purpose, Profits Are Not Enough

So how can a company go about crafting an effective purpose?

To get a sense of what sorts of purposes would motivate Millennial employees, Deloitte asked Millennials what goals they thought businesses should pursue, and the extent to which they felt that businesses are achieving these goals.

Only 34% of respondents pointed to “generating a profit” as an important goal for business. So really, it’s time to shelve “maximising shareholder value” as an organisational purpose or mission.

The other top goals cited:

• generating jobs (35%)
• improving society (27%)
• driving innovation (26%)
• enabling progress (25%)

Hint: all goals focused on creating value for society, not for shareholders.

It’s the same for the broader universe of workers and executives. In Deloitte’s 2014 Core Beliefs and Culture Survey, “generating a financial return for our stakeholders/shareholders” was only the 5th most important component of purpose. Instead, respondents viewed creating products and services that benefited their customers and society as the most important component of their company’s purpose.

The Purpose Misalignment

Unfortunately, Deloitte’s surveys also suggest that simply defining a purpose for your company is not enough.

Both the 2014 and 2013 Core Beliefs & Culture Survey found a clear misalignment between leaders’ and employees’ perceptions of how successfully their companies were implementing their purpose. In particular, the surveys found that executives are much more engaged with organisational purpose than employees.

In the 2013 survey, 64% of executives felt that they could easily explain how they and their company served its stated purpose, but only 41% of employees felt the same way. Only a small minority of employees agreed that their company’s purpose had influenced their decision to join the company and continue to work there, while more than 50% of executives felt the same way.

Similarly, the 2014 survey found that 47% of executives identified with their company’s purpose, but only 30% of employees did so, and while 44% of executives felt that their company’s leadership lived the organisation’s purpose, only 25% of employees perceived this to be the case.

This misalignment in the uptake of organisational purpose is driven in no small part by a failure of communication at the leadership level. Less than 40% of respondents surveyed in 2014 felt that their organisation’s purpose was “clearly conveyed to ALL employees”.

By failing to get their employees to rally behind their company’s purpose, leaders are sacrificing a golden opportunity to attract and retain top talent, to recruit committed advocates for the company’s brand, and to make it easier for employees to make business decisions that contribute to meeting the company’s long-term objectives.

Moreover, by aligning a company’s employees, customers, and other stakeholders around its shared purpose, leaders can create a sense of confidence in their organisation that facilitates innovation and investment in future growth.

Introducing Enviable Workplace’s Purpose at Work Survey

So how can you tell if your company’s employees are aligned with its purpose? In fact, do they even know what that purpose is?

…

Enviable Workplace’s Purpose at Work Survey was designed to help you to measure your organisation’s level of alignment and identify the drivers of any misalignment.

The 10-minute survey asks your employees to state your company’s purpose in their own words. We then use text analytics to compare their responses to the company’s stated purpose, which allows us to measure the extent to which your employees can even identify the purpose set by the company’s leaders.

To measure alignment, we compare responses across different departments and roles. Finally, we use a custom scale to measure the extent to which employees in different departments and roles believe in and are motivated by your company’s purpose.

If you are interested in beta-testing EW’s Purpose at Work Survey, we can help you to better understand your business by providing you with a report that includes a purpose alignment score and a purpose engagement score for your company (and for individual departments or roles, if your organisation is big enough). We will also provide you with a driver analysis to help you understand how your company’s levels of purpose alignment and engagement are impacting business outcomes like employee recruitment and retention.

If we find a serious misalignment, we would be happy to discuss further diagnostic research that generates actionable insights about how to improve your employees’ alignment and engagement with your company’s purpose.

For more information please contact our labmates:

London, England:

andy@enviableworkplace.com

+44 (0) 7976 262776

Toronto, Canada

james@enviableworkplace.com

+1 604 780 2242

View online: Align your company purpose to win over Millennials

In the next few minutes you’ll learn the mindset of a great teacher wanting to get the best out of his people – while growing a Chinese Silicon Valley-esque global trade company – which now shifts more money than Amazon AND eBay combined.  D a m n.

And Jack Ma might be the founder of largest company you don’t know about, Alibaba. The birth of Alibaba’s company culture, arguably, is the main reason people performed so well… blending the best of the East and West.

1 sentence overview if you are new to the name:

Alibaba: a Chinese e-commerce group with 27,000 employees, started by a sixth form teacher out of his apartment in 1999, with a market cap of 215 billion and the worlds largest IPO to date.

From 0 to 27,000 Employees

Briefly, do you know how Chinese management style differs from the West? This different culture helped Ma boldly lead massive upward momentum… (such as setting specific goals for his employees and then a week or two later tripling the goal – and his employees would rise and meet the challenge.)

Last week, Enviable Workplace had a chat about culture with Porter Erisman, former Vice President at Alibaba and author of Alibaba’s World: How a Remarkable Chinese Company Is Changing the Face of Global Business. Porter interviewed for the company in 2000 when there were just 45 employees (now there are over 27,000) and left in 2008. He got to witness the maturation of Alibaba’s company culture and now shares these 6 areas with us:

1. What is the purpose of Alibaba? What is the focus for Alibaba’s employees?

2. Patience is a Virtue? How Alibaba used patience to outmanoeuvre eBay

3. Team strength: Chinese management style blended with Silicon Valley spirit

4. If you have to pick one: Hire all-stars or a team that works well together?

5. How employee mistakes, and ego, are handled

6. Rejecting Up or Out Career Progression

What is the point of Alibaba? Purpose?

…or as Simon Sinek would cooly pitch: “What’s the why?”

Porter: “We were building a platform for entrepreneurs, just like eBay started as a platform for entrepreneurs. Our goal was phrased in very idealistic terms which was: to create jobs for entrepreneurs.”

And to achieve this, Alibaba’s customers need to win before Alibaba’s profits.

“We would first, and Jack would remind us, make sure our website users were making money, and only after they were making money would we make money. Jack Ma was great at making people chase after the goal – and not after him. We were trying to achieve the goal, not just to please him.”

When you look at Alibaba’s competitors (such as eBay), every one of them “should have beat Alibaba.” Except their competitors were following Wall Street’s expectations… right off a cliff.

In 2000, all the Wall Street analysts were saying the end goal was to build an end-to-end transaction system… That you could order 20,000 tennis rackets online at the click of a button from a seller in China. But Alibaba realised that that’s not what their customer wanted. So they pushed back against these analysts and focused on the customer.

For a look at Alibaba’s official stance check out their Culture & Values page.

How Alibaba used patience to unnerve eBay

Alibaba knew eBay’s investors didn’t have the patience we had to prevail in China. So they took a number of steps to put pressure on eBay to make the Wall Street investors think that they were mad men willing to never charge money for the website – and that allowed them to survive.

Key example, the creation of Alibaba’s Chinese C2C service TaoBao:

The main KPI for the management team was to create a certain amount of jobs for the TaoBao users.

In the early days, Jack told the team they needed to create X million jobs this year. “If you bring in revenues past a certain goal, I will penalise you. Because it means you are trying to make too much money from the site at this point.”

Chinese Management style blended with Silicon Valley Spirit

Jack Ma led meetings the same way a teacher might lead a class. He “encouraged suggestions but where he needed to be, strict. Being a former teacher made him a great leader of an inexperienced team like ours – his goal was to help us develop into really good managers.”

When you look at Alibaba and a typical Silicon Valley start up, it carries a familiar idealism. By now, most people are sceptical of tech companies wanting to change the world. “But that’s what we believe and that’s what we ended up doing, in a way.”

There are very Chinese things about it too. On Porter’s first company outing, their first retreat felt like a family affair. Chinese management style is more group oriented. It’s more focused [compared to the West] on including people.

If you look at Western companies they usually have about two co-founders, well Alibaba had 18 co-founders. “Chinese companies can, maybe, manage group leadership better than in the west – which tends to be more individualistic.”

What’s better, hire all stars or a team that works well together?

It’s more important to find a team that works well than a dream team made up of all-stars with great resumes – “we tried that at Alibaba, a team of western managers with MBAs and really nice resumes.. but the team didn’t work well together.”

In Eric Shmidt’s book, How Google Works, they talk about hiring divas and trying to cultivate them, “I take a different view. It’s better, it’s more fun to work with a team where everyone is focused on a goal and less on themselves. People with egos would get spit out of the company over time. It’s ok to have an ego as long as your goal is to see the company succeed. If you put that goal of your own ego than you are helping the company.”

How Employee Mistakes Are Handled

When Porter joined he came in with this layer of managers that was western style perfectionist… but Jack Ma would tease him that there was a reputation in the company that “the western managers would do a lot of analysis but take less action while the Chinese team was more about action and results than analysis.” In Chinese there’s a saying, Actions speak louder than words.

“I was in charge of the international website and I think for Jack’s taste I was moving too slowly. He told me, Porter, I’m not going to get mad at you for making mistakes, but I can’t accept you doing nothing. If you do something and make a mistake, fine. But if you do nothing, I’ll replace you.”

Rejecting Up or Out Career Progression

When Porter was at Alibaba, his title changed 8 times in 8 years. After every year management would rotate positions depending on what the team’s need was. Almost like a basketball team uses substitutes depending on what mode of attack the team is in.

One nice skill in Alibaba, “and I think this is more Chinese: it wasn’t just up or out for managers. If you rose in the company and found yourself in a position that maybe wasn’t the best fit, Jack Ma was good at allowing you to save face and gracefully move to another role.. that role might be of lower status, but you could stay within the company.”

For example: One of the cofounders was placed in a sales role in Shanghai – “He was probably the worst sales person in the office. Even I thought that this might be the end of the road for this guy.” Well Jack Ma saw what he was good at and put him in charge of the Chinese language website. And he rose to the top and became employee of the year.

It’s hard when you go down one route and haven’t succeeded. Most companies spit these employees out. But when a startup is growing quickly you can’t afford to lose high potential people just because they were in the wrong role for a short time.

One of Alibaba’s core values that everyone was evaluated on was “embrace change”. Something western startups can learn from this: management can be done more in a consensus basis rather than the western way.

» Want to learn more about Alibaba’s company culture? Buy Porter’s book: Alibaba’s World (2015)

View online: Alibaba Company Culture Case Study: East meets West

When Time magazine introduced 2014 by announcing ‘The Mindful Revolution’ had arrived, jaded executives everywhere, looking for ways to manage their own version of ADHD, looked up from their spreadsheets momentarily and gave breathing a try. But many didn’t stop long enough to discover the secret behind the power that lies at the heart of mindfulness.

The data confirms, interest in Mindfulness is at an all time high.

I was recently watching a re-run of the movie Limitless staring Bradley Cooper, about an out of work writer who discovers a top-secret designer drug that bestows him with super human abilities. The drug allows him to use 100 percent of his mind and makes him laser focused and more confident than any person alive. It’s a seductive idea and the stuff of science fiction, but what if you were offered a pill that you could take once a day that would at least reduce anxiety and depressed mood, increase your energy levels, enhance the capacity of your mind to focus and improve decision making.

Well, a review of the scientific literature for the past 15 years suggests that the psychological equivalent of a pill may exist. It’s called mindfulness. But beyond its role in stress reduction, why is mindfulness such a critical tool for business leaders?

There are many ways to explain mindfulness, what it is and what it does, and how it works. Essentially it’s a form of meditation. It involves paying close attention to the mind and body in a focused way that allows the mind to settle into its natural state of calm awareness, free of the distractions of compulsive thought and fantasy.

In a business environment where the pace of change is unrelenting, to show up to work with a peaceful focused mind that is nimble and adaptable – more responsive than reactive – is certainly a powerful tool.

Contemplative Science Meets Western Science

The prolific interest in mindfulness in the West can be traced to the Mind and Life Conference held in Dharmasala, India in 2000. At that conference some of the best scientists in their fields met with the Dalai Lama to discuss what relationship there could possibly be between the centuries-old practice of meditation and mindfulness and modern science?

I recently met with two contributors to the Dharmasala conference, Richard Davidson, a leading neuroscientist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Alan Wallace, arguably the most authoritative scholar and interpreter of mindfulness to the West. Both men have been involved in pioneering the science behind mindfulness for many years. They refer to a long list of scientific publications documenting the effectiveness of mindfulness in reducing a range of stress related diseases, as well as cultivating a sense of overall well being.

And, as Davidson’s feature article in this month’s edition of Scientific American reports, there is nothing soft about this data. Davidson has demonstrated convincingly that meditation and mindfulness produces significant positive changes in both the function and structure of the brain.

The First Bottom Line – Improve Performance

As the scientific data supporting the benefits of mindfulness grows, so does its popularity, especially among business leaders. Of course, the initial attraction of mindfulness to business leaders is often as a stress-reduction technique. The ability to clarify the mind and relax the body as a way to relieve stress is compelling.

Stress Reduction, Yes. But Cultivating Insight is Mission Critical

In many ways, the goals of mindfulness overlap with many of the objectives of clinical psychology, psychiatry, preventive medicine and education. As we understand more of the neuroscience behind mindfulness, how it changes the brain, boosts focus and eases stress, it will continue to attract more adherents from the corporate world. But I would go further and argue that this is an altogether too limited view of the potential value of mindfulness practice to business.

Mindfulness at its root is a spiritual practice. By spiritual of course I don’t mean religious. In a genuine effort to distance the secular practice of mindfulness from its original role in nearly all religions, secular trainers often forget that the core of mindfulness is the cultivation of the mind’s potential. Being spiritual is about the experience of awakening to your potential and becoming more aware of your true purpose.

“The theory and practice of mindfulness belong to a class of methods for cultivating insight and emotional balance.” -Alan Wallace

By cultivating insight a person becomes more intimately acquainted not only with their behaviour, but also with their motives. In particular, they become more conscious of the values that both guide their actions and create a sense of meaning and purpose.

The leaders I’ve met who regularly practice mindfulness have two things in common, they are values-based and have a clear sense of the value of what they are trying to achieve – their mission. They manage to connect their own purpose to the company’s purpose and, as such, provide the inspiration critical to a new generation of employees looking to work for businesses that have a clear purpose and create multiple kinds of value.

The Double Bottom Line

This may initially sound a bit too touchy-feely to business leaders and HRDs trained to focus on commercial realities and the bottom line. However, leading economist, Robert Reich suggested recently that we’re moving into a completely new economy. In this age of networked intelligence, every aspect of business as we know it is being disrupted by technology and the participation economy. Customers are demanding that organisations contribute to a greater good and do more than just make money. Young employees today want to work for more than just a paycheck; they want their work to matter.

According to Robert Safian, editor of Fast Company, 90 percent of respondents to a recent change.org study reported being willing to give up some financial reward in exchange for making a difference in the world. In other words, businesses are being asked to provide a double bottom line, both personal and professional. Reich went on to suggest that in this new economy “we have no idea where new leadership insights will come from.” I disagree!

Cultivating the Mind of A Leader

The evidence from behavioral science, including behavioural economics, is increasingly compelling. To succeed in the new economy, businesses will need to be led by emotionally and spiritually intelligent leaders who have a clear personal and professional mission that inspires a passionate, engaged, workforce and loyal customer base. They will need to be more conscious of a higher purpose and more aware of their impact on the world, the environment and the economy.

The emotional and social architecture of these skills have been described clearly by emotional intelligence, along with the clinical support offered by neuroscience. The evidence for the efficacy of mindfulness in the reduction of stress is beyond question. And, although mindfulness may not be a panacea that provides access to limitless intelligence, it certainly holds promise as a vehicle for cultivating a mind capable of achieving higher peaks of emotional and cognitive function. Breathtaking!

Editor’s Note: London Mindfulness Workshop

We’ll be joining Martyn Newman in London on March 19th and 20th 2015 for Europe’s largest emotional intelligence summit: EQ Summit.

Specifically, if you are interested in discovering and developing your mindfulness, Alan Wallace will be holding a one-day intensive mindfulness workshop on March 19th 2015 as an exclusive ‘Pre’ event for the EQ Summit. More information and registration can be found here or by clicking on the banner below:

We hope to see you there. – Filip

View online: What They Don’t Teach You About Mindfulness At Business School

Few individuals can claim to have conducted 20,000 interviews (yes, that is twenty thousand!), which to put into context is four per working day for the last twenty years.

BusinessWeek calls Claudio Fernández-Aráoz ‘one of the most influential executive search consultants in the world.’ Add to that the list of internationally renowned names who have sought his consultancy, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and you begin to get a picture of the level of expertise this man brings to the table.

Whether you are hiring, or hoping to in the future, Claudio Fernández-Aráoz shares with Enviable Workplace readers his vast experience on how to go about finding the right person to take your business forward.

Finding Your Top Executives: The Four Key Attributes Claudio Looks For

In the early years, that is after only around a thousand or so interviews, Claudio began to get a sense of how to best judge candidates.  ‘You get better once you know what to look for… once you have a valid and reliable inventory of competencies,’ he told me.

So when it comes to key leadership assets, what should you be looking for? Claudio has signposted four values common to all high-potential executives:

Curiosity – asking questions, taking genuine interest, and seeking new knowledge and experience

Insight – making innovative connections between existing concepts, offering fresh perspectives

Engagement – the ability to use emotion and logic to communicate a persuasive vision and connect people

Determination – the commitment to persevering in spite of adversity

Wrong Brain, Wrong Education, Wrong Time of Day 

But like many things, Claudio explains how this is easier on paper than in practise, ‘making people decisions is very hard, and making great people decisions is brutally hard.’

It is impossible to remove the human element from the process and this means it will always have its imperfections, ‘even Jack Welch once said to me that when he was first promoted at his first junior managerial role he started keeping track of his success and failure, and he initially would get 50% wrong. Thirty years after that, of which the last twenty at the helm of General Electric as CEO leading the largest value creation in world corporate history, he would still get it wrong 20% of the time.’

But why are these decisions so hard to get right?

‘It is difficult for two reasons. One is we have the wrong brain. We are full of unconscious psychological biases that lead us into surrounding with people similar to us, familiar to us, with whom we feel comfortable. A way to fight this bias is to make sure that you become explicit about the competencies needed for the job and you get the hard evidence that the person will be able to deliver according to the needs of the job.’

Claudio claims the second reason is that ‘we have the wrong education… very few people have studied assessment.’ He told me about a time he was giving a speech at the World Business Forum in New York in front of 4000 executives. ‘I asked how many of you have screwed up royally at least a few people decisions. All 4000 raised their hands. I asked how many of you have studied assessment. Only 20 raised their hands. How can you master this if you don’t study?’

Aside from starting out with the wrong brain and the wrong education another common mistake that people make is to make too many choices in one day, leading to what Claudio calls ego depletion or decision fatigue.

This means is that either resisting temptation or making difficult decisions tires us enormously, and as a result of that we fall into one of two negative behaviours. One is being afraid of making a decision and not deciding, and the other one is just taking risks on those decisions.

There is research on this. Judges in Israel were deciding on prisoners who were on parole. At the beginning of the day, fresh after breakfast, most of those individuals were left free, but when the day was advancing and they were tired a much larger percentage were not set free. ‘Whether you went to jail or not depended on how full the belly of the judge was, which is ridiculous.’

Once aware of this fact there are many ways to avoid ego depletion:

• Try to outsource routine decisions
• Try to avoid temptation. Don’t go to an all you can eat restaurant
• Schedule your most critical activities when you are fresh, for example at the beginning of the day or right after lunch
• Take breaks. There is even research that shows if you eat something with sugar you can reverse ego depletion

The Interviewing Process: A Conversation Between Two Liars

When it comes to assessing a candidate’s attributes, getting the interviewing process right is the first step. Claudio explained he defined the typical interview as a ‘conversation between two liars’.

Liar number one: is the one who’s trying to sell the job and the organisation and tells you welcome to paradise. “You will never find a place where you will have these career opportunities where you will make so much money, where you have such a wonderful culture. Welcome to paradise.”

Liar Number two: I am desperate to get the job. I present my best angle. I give the impression that the day I sign it’s going to be God himself working in paradise. That’s a bad interview.

Rather than asking frequent questions about things like strengths and weakness, Claudio suggests getting straight to the point: ‘if you’re looking for a project manager that needs to manage a project with a very tight deadline and a very strict budget, you ask the person if they have you ever managed a project with a tight deadline and a strict budget. What was your role? What were the circumstances? What was the situation? What did you do? How did you do it? What were the consequences? That’s a better interview. You probe and probe.’

Another way to mitigate potential errors in the interviewing process is to have the only the most appropriate people involved. Involve people who are good at assessing, who know what the job is about, and who have the right motivation.

Where one person’s judgement is too limited, any more than three people involved in the process brings no further advantage.

If you want to hire people who are top 10%, even if you are very accurate the problem is that most people are not top 10%. If you only put one interviewer, there is a significant chance that some who are not top 10%, because of the interviewing mistakes that we all make, gets hired. If, rather than having just one person assess the candidates, you have three filters, filter two only interviews those that have passed the assessment of filter one, and filter three only assesses those that have passed the assessment of the previous two filters, the probability of hiring a wrong person is very low.

The more filters you add, the more you increase the chances of the second type of error which is killing the right candidate for the wrong reason. Typically the best trade off is to have three people involved in the process and no more than that.

So which three people does Claudio recommend?

It should be the boss of the position, the boss of the boss, and some really senior human resources professional who is a master at assessing people.

Reference Checking

Due to the imperfection of the interviewing process, Claudio explained the importance of complementing it with proper reference checking.

Aside from some people’s propensity to lie, he explained that there is also the fact that ‘unless you’re clinically depressed, we all have this optimistic bias. We think that we are much better than we are.’

BusinessWeek polled 2000 senior executives and middle managers, asking: within your own organisation in your own level, are you in the top ten percent, yes or no? ‘Out of 2000 people, you would expect that roughly 10% would say yes I’m in the top 10%, but the answer was that 90% believed they were in the top ten 10%. Obviously, that’s a mathematical impossibility. That’s why you need to check references.’

Claudio recommends reading between the lines of a reference, is the person saying too much or too little? This could be a negative sign. As with the interview, Claudio maintains it is best to get right to the details and probe for concrete examples where the individual has displayed the necessary skills.

The Most Important Decision

In Claudio’s opinion, hiring the right people is the most important move a business can make and should have the correct resources dedicated to it, ‘making great people decisions is not an art. It’s not an intuition. It is a craft and a discipline that can be learned and should be learned for our success.’

‘We choose our spouses. We choose our bosses. We choose our friends. We choose the people who work with us. We choose our nannies. We choose our lawyers. We choose our doctors. It is definitely worthwhile investing in learning, because this is not rocket science, but it requires discipline.’

What Now?

This article could be the beginning of that education. Next time you are considering hiring consider Claudio’s key points:

• Make sure you are looking for the right skills, for a top executive the four key attributes (curiosity, insight, engagement and determination) are top of the list
• Conduct a three tiered interview involving individuals trained in assessment and relevant to the post (such as the boss of the position, the top boss and an HR professional) asking detailed and specific questions directly related to the skill set sought
• Complement the interview with detailed and thorough reference checking
• Fight bias and re-educate yourself to develop a disciplined approach to choosing the right people for the right job and enjoy greater success

Learn More. Get Claudio’s book

It’s Not the How or the What but the Who – Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best. Find it on Amazon.

View online: 20,000 Interviews Later: A Lesson in Hiring Top Executives