The Gartner Talent Angle

*This excerpt was taken from our 2020 interview. Few of us work in roles designed to our personal specifications. In his new book Personalization at Work: How HR Can Use Job Crafting to Drive Performance, Engagement and Wellbeing , Rob Baker argues that employees thrive when allowed to craft their roles to fit their strengths. Baker provides HR leaders and professionals with tools and guidance to create workplace environments that empower employees to customize their jobs to meet their needs.

While technology such as instant messaging and videoconferencing have driven digital productivity, leaders and managers are struggling to effectively communicate with their teams using these tools. Entrepreneur Joe Freed joins the Gartner Talent Angle to share how technologies will reduce cognitive load and enhance culture initiatives. He also shares seven markers of digital interactions to assess the health of your organizational culture in the hybrid world. Joe Freed is the Co-founder and CEO of Cultivate, a technology company providing a leadership development platform for the digital workforce. He has led several startups focused on online learning and HR technology, and lectures at UC Berkeley Extension.

*This excerpt was taken from our 2020 interview. Culture change efforts often yield little more than a survey assessing current culture followed by ineffective action steps to achieve change. On this episode of the Gartner Talent Angle, Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s Chief People Officer, shares how Microsoft not only incites culture change, but also how they foster a growth mindset to ensure employees are comfortable learning and failing in order to grow.

In this Gartner Talent Angle podcast, labor market expert Martha Ross explores how non-college-educated talent can excel at organizations with the right on-the-job learning opportunities. She offers tactics for organizations seeking to diversify their recruitment strategies and improve sourcing of underrepresented talent. Martha Ross is a senior fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. Ross researches and writes about workers and the labor market, with a focus on low-wage and underemployed workers, the education and employment experiences of 18- to 24-year-olds, pathways to good jobs for young adults, and COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on these talent segments. She has a master’s degree from the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration and a bachelor’s degree from Colorado College.

*This excerpt was taken from our 2020 interview. In his book Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments, Stefan Thomke shares that bright ideas and decisive actions alone do not create innovation. Instead, innovation depends on a culture of experimentation which values the science of testing. By stripping big ideas into hypotheses to test what does and doesn't work, organizations are better positioned to establish a competitive edge and generate strong financial returns. 

Hear Jeff Kavanaugh, author of The Live Enterprise, discuss how to transform your organization into an ever-evolving, continuously learning industry leader. He provides a clear path to transform large and complex businesses into agile ecosystems that evolve with changing market needs. 

*This episode is an excerpt taken from our 2020 interview. The power of preventative thinking is one that is underutilized by organizations and individuals alike; a shortcoming which perpetuates reactive, rather than proactive, solutions. This according to Dan Heath, author of Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. In his book, Heath makes the case for an upstream mindset — arguing that this approach can effectively surface solutions to seemingly intractable problems by highlighting early warning indicators.

Eliza VanCort, organizational consultant and author, argues that more women should unapologetically exercise power in their communication and leadership styles. In her book, "A Woman's Guide to Claiming Space: Stand Tall. Raise Your Voice. Be Heard.," she offers relevant research, concrete strategies and actionable tools for women to claim space with courage, empathy and conviction. VanCort urges women to push through their fears and engage in behaviors that better position them to lead and be heard.

*This episode is an excerpt taken from our 2020 interview. In this episode of The Talent Angle podcast, Alden Mills, author of Unstoppable Teams: The 4 Essential Actions of High-Performance Leadership, discusses his C.A.R.E.-based leadership framework. Mills shares how HR and business leaders can overcome personal barriers and build teams that are motivated by factors greater than themselves.

Ram Charan, business advisor and author, introduces a new leadership thinking approach to help executives exploit shifts in their business landscapes. In the book “The Phoenix Encounter Method,” he and his co-authors — Ian Woodward, V. “Paddy” Padmanabhan and Sameer Hasija — offer a methodology to use change as a catalyst for transformation. According to Charan, leaders can adopt this new mental frame by: developing a nuanced understanding of their operating environments; pressure-testing options for legacy business and innovation; and leveraging new competencies and emerging technologies for business growth.