Are you listening or waiting to voice your own opinions? A recent exchange with someone I respect for many reasons, but struggle to understand for many others, reminded me of how important this topic is today. If we expect to communicate effectively we need to listen for comprehension before we can reply constructively.
There’s so much anger, hatred, and misunderstanding in our world. The problem has been exacerbated by social media and related tools that make it very easy to communicate sound bites but difficult to communicate emotions. With technology getting in the way it’s easy to forget that behind the words are individuals with valid thoughts and feelings.
So the question I have is what can we do about it? I started looking at different communication streams such as WhatsApp and Twitter among others. I noticed that instead of using long form posts there are more people using the ability to string along multiple short messages to more comprehensively express an opinion.
This method of communicating in short bits is susceptible to a specific type of issue. Most of the responses seemed to be immediate responses to individual parts of the thread. As a result, instead of responding to the overall comprehensive thought, individuals are responding to one point which by itself might not adequately capture the idea.
Poor Listening is Bad for Business
The fact is, this is not a new phenomenon. It exists in many corporate offices today. It goes like this …
Me: I was thinking perhaps we should rethink the way our team works ….
Them (interrupting): I totally agree. We tend to only talk to those we think hold power.
Me: Actually, I was more specifically focused on the tools and processes we use for collaboration …..
Them (interrupting again): Yes, totally on point. Because the most important person in the room always takes up too much time during meetings.
Me: That might be true, but I really want to focus on the way we get work done, which as you know is 90% of our time whereas the meetings you are referencing are only 10% ….
Perhaps you have experienced this?
The challenge is that by the time you have finished your first sentence, everyone in the conversation has immediately jumped to a conclusion and their biases have surfaced. Once their opinions have come to the forefront of their mind, it becomes very difficult to shove them back. Therefore you find that regardless of what you say they will get their point out even if it actually has nothing to do with what you intended to cover.
Five Tips to Better Listening and Improved Communication
1. Prepare for the Meeting
Pre-read any materials sent out before a meeting noting important points and referencing things you didn’t know before. This will enable you to more constructively provide feedback both positive and negative. Having an overview of the key points will reduce the risk of you first seeing something that may cause a visceral reaction during the meeting.
Even if you read something with which you vehemently disagree, the additional time to consider and react will reduce the likelihood of a blow up during the meeting. It also gives you the chance to reach out and discuss the point in a one on one manner with the individual if necessary. As an added benefit this allows you time to do your own research and provide supporting information for your point of view.
2. Practice Active Listening
Active Listening is a requirement for both verbal and written communication. Effective listening requires an open mind, paying attention, appropriate feedback, and empathy. Without these skills disagreements and miscommunication are bound to ensue.
A family member of mine has what I call “rapid response syndrome”. He sees the first line of a message, assumes what the rest of the message will be, and begins to reply immediately. The disagreement starts before the first thought is even completed.
When looking at a text message whether it is on teams, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, or I message you should be able to see when an individual is still typing. I use this as a great indicator as to whether they have finished their thought and are ready for my response. Once they are finished typing, I read the entire stream, wait a few moments, consider both the words they wrote, the intention and context, then consider how I want to reply.
3. Breathe
Practice breathing. It can be very very uncomfortable, but consider the concept of buffering. Local television stations doing live shows actually broadcast with just enough latency that they can bleep out the errant profanity or crude gesture. It’s not minutes but seconds.
In a conversation, seconds can make a huge difference. Try to let your colleague finish his or her sentence fully, pause and breathe for 3-5 seconds. As you’re reading, it sounds like nothing, right? Try it. To many it will feel like FOREVER. Over time, it will be much more natural. If helpful, simply say “Well” or “Thanks” to cover some of that “long” gap.
4. Don’t Interrupt
Think about how you feel when you are interrupted at work or at home. It doesn’t feel good does it? When we interrupt someone it changes the dynamics of the conversation. They may feel that they are not being respected and that their point isn’t being heard resulting in anger, rudeness, or resentment.
A second but at least equally important problem with interrupting is that we don’t actually get to hear what the other person was going to say. Instead of listening we made an assumption and imposed our ideas over theirs. Additionally we likely derailed their train of thought in which case we may never get to hear where they wanted the conversation to go.
5. Be Empathetic
Always consider context and never forget the person with whom you are speaking is a person. They have feelings and a right to be heard. Try to visualize what you are hearing, put yourself in their position, and listen with empathy.
Effective communication is just as much about listening as it is about sharing our own thoughts and ideas. Consider your own communication prowess. Are you listening or thinking about what you want to say next?
Be well. Lead on.
Adam
Covid is still an issue. Please stay safe and wear a mask.
Adam L. Stanley
Connections Blog Technology. Leadership. Food. Life.
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Technology has made many things about our lives better. As a geeky, technology evangelizing, digital dude, I would say technology has made MOST things better. We have quicker communication (sometimes I wish this was not the case). Some work processes are more effective (sadly not all). We can keep costs down in businesses. Scale happens faster. Connections with clients are richer. Analytics more powerful in decision making. And technology has touched essentially every industry. Customer demand shifts, competition from just about everywhere, and an increasingly challenging operational and regulatory environment mean that every company, from the most “manual” to the most high tech are all in essence technology companies. Every business is a technology business now.
Many companies still hire a lot off of competence metrics. Just peruse a list of openings on LinkedIn and dozens of them still list long bullets that would have been on job descriptions 10 years ago: where you went to school, what you studied, years of experience, how much you know about x or y. Makes perfect sense and may not change anytime soon for a lot of our roles. But competence is becoming overrated as a hiring driving force. We live in a VUCA business environment — volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous — and technology has allowed executives to open up revenue streams they never thought possible. Priorities and objectives can switch on a dime in some companies. We don’t necessarily need the most competent financial guy in history; we need a financial guy who can switch between different approaches as it’s called for.
In short: less bullet points, more real people with curiosity and skills. What skills? I have a short list and welcome your ideas.
2. Accept inevitability of artificial intelligence: It will probably take your job, or a part of your job, someday. But for now we are taking the last major Industrial Revolution and going through another one, but the new one is compressed into the life span of a dog. You can’t hire people right now who have their heads in the sand about this. Maybe they don’t know how to code robots. That is fine. But they need to know this is coming and need to understand what it will mean for business models.
3. Be at least decent presenting: It’s shifting a bit with a more remote workforce, but we still get ideas/pitches across via presentations. Many people are terrible at presentations but techies tend to be even worse than normal. Not every job needs effective presentation skills, but we should be evaluating candidates based on how well they can get across an idea. If you can’t get across a simple idea or advance a concept, what value will you ultimately be to a business? Especially when, again, every business is a tech business.
4. Understand mobile and targeting: You might think this is just for marketing roles. It’s not. The greatest promise of mobile is that you can find specific consumers literally in the palm of their hand. 2017 job candidates should understand the scale/scope of mobile, how mobile works as a targeting device, and what the hiring company’s business model could/should do with mobile. They may not drive the strategy on it, no, but if they don’t understand it, they’re going to enter the role a few steps behind. And this is not limited to consumer businesses.
5. Demonstrate intellectual curiosity: I am amazed at how many people recruiting for roles today are concerned about “job hoppers” and, perhaps related, how many companies do not encourage continuous movement within a company. IBM, despite recent financial challenges, has created a culture that encourages and almost requires regular movement. For those of you who exercise, you know that half the battle is about continuously “surprising” your muscles, switching it up so your body never gets complacent. Your brain is the same and if a company does not commit to providing you opportunities to stretch and grow it, you will get bored. So shouldn’t every interview include questions that probe intellectual curiosity? In an era where 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years, I want people that are fascinated by change, not just accepting of it. I blogged a while ago about Hiring for Character and Values. And one of the main targets was the curious.
Let me know what you think. What do you view as key to hiring in this digital era? How do you build the best teams around different types of team members?
Be well. Lead On. Adam
Adam L. Stanley Connections Blog Technology. Leadership. Food. Life.
Let me start out this post by saying it’s NOT about politics. In fact, let me repeat that one more time right up top: it’s not about politics. It’s about how a figure in the 2016 political landscape — nope, not Trump — can teach you something about business and culture within organizations.
I was watching a few nights of the Democratic National Convention last week and when I saw Bernie Sanders speaking to the crowd, I sent a one-word text to a good friend of mine: Brilliant.
Why did I think it was brilliant?
Bernie Sanders took his followers through three major stages of any process:
Celebration
Application
Dedication
This is insanely hard to do. In fact, just the other week — after seeing Bernie at the convention — I was having lunch with a colleague and we were talking about merger integration. As I think most people know or realize, most mergers fail. (83% is a conventional number thrown around.) And yet, we see them every week — in this summer alone, we’ve seen Microsoft grab LinkedIn (for a lot) and Verizon grab Yahoo (for not nearly as much). That part makes sense: mergers are one of the fastest paths to growth.
Here’s what is harder: in every merger or acquisition, there’s a company and set of leaders who “won” or will “win” in terms of their ideas, processes, and culture coming through stronger. This happens in politics, obviously: Clinton beat Sanders, and Trump beat Cruz and Rubio and others. It’s the nature of competition that certain people, and ideas, win out over others.
Every company and leader that gets into these positions, though, has a Bernie Moment. It’s where you can choose to move from application to dedication on behalf of another set of leaders, or another company.
You can’t miss the Bernie Moment. When you miss it, your merger/acquisition is headed for that 83% failure rate stat above.
So what’s the method for arriving at the Bernie Moment? I’d say it breaks down into five parts:
Celebrate the previous victories
If you watched Bernie’s speech at the DNC, he spent the first couple of minutes on himself. He talked about all the votes he received. He mentioned that donations averaged $27 (the crowd loved that part). He mentioned all the voters who had never participated before. He defined it as a movement, essentially.
This was a crucial step because you had 5-10 minutes of yelling and hollering in a happy way. The crowd was chanting “Bernie!” almost the entire time. This needed to happen first, because if he had gone right into supporting Hillary, his supporters would have booed the hell out of that. A TV moment like that isn’t good for Hillary, and it isn’t good for what Bernie accomplished in this campaign cycle.
For a leader, then, it needs to begin with celebrating the wins that came before. That gets everyone aligned around the greatness of the cause and the work.
Be honest about change
After the crowd was fired up, Bernie admitted defeat. He lost. It wasn’t useful to sugarcoat it. He came right out and said it:
I understand that many people here in this convention hall and around the country are disappointed about the final results of the nominating process. I think it’s fair to say that no one is more disappointed than I am.
If you’re familiar with the standard stages of grief, it looks something like this:
As a leader or when building out a culture/movement, though, it doesn’t move in this exact way. Bernie almost began on the far right side — affirmation, hope — then moved down to depression. It’s almost the reverse of the standard grief curve, which usually happens when a loved one dies or something else terrible happens.
By now, though, Bernie had fired up the crowd then reset them in reality. Now it was time for the transition point.
Transition
Here’s what he did here:
Let me be as clear as I can be. This election is not about and has never been about Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or any of the other candidates who sought the presidency. This election is not about political gossip, it’s not about polls, it’s not about campaign strategy, it is not about all the things that the media spends so much time discussing.
This election is about and must be about the needs of the American people and the kind of future we create for our children and our grandchildren.
In short, this is what he was saying: the mission is the mission, and the mission is important. It’s not about the people. It’s about the purpose.
This has TONS of implications in mergers/acquisitions, because usually what happens in those contexts is that one culture is totally absorbed by the other — so the “losing” culture is chucked out the window, essentially. If you have one culture based on financial metrics only and one culture based on collaboration/sharing, and the latter culture loses, well, those people who liked collaboration feel they now have to adapt or get a new job ASAP.
Leaders often try to skirt this issue by appealing to mission, purpose, and core values. That’s the “transition” moment in mergers. That’s when you move from “We were two companies” to “Now we’re one company, and let’s be honest, stuff will be different around here.” But you can make people focus less on what’s going to be different by appealing to a purpose. That’s what Bernie did and what a good leader can do.
Moving On
In standard grief cycles, this is “acceptance.” Bernie transitioned to supporting Clinton and encouraging others to support her as well. Days earlier, when he even remotely suggested this, he was booed. But here, he had to move on. Now, it’s easier to move on when you can …
Find a common enemy
In an article from The New Yorker about how the gun industry markets itself (and please remember, again, that this post is not meant to be political), there was a reference to the acknowledged technique of generating revenue by emphasizing the boundaries of a community. “We all have the need to belong,” he wrote in a presentation entitled “How to Turn One of Mankind’s Deepest Needs Into Cold, Hard Cash.” In a section called “How Do You Create Belief & Belonging?” he explained, “You can’t have a yin without a yang. Must have an enemy.”
Bernie made Trump, and his implied lack of focus on mission/purpose, the common enemy. In this way, he wasn’t necessarily “siding” with Hillary so much as he was working alongside her against a common foe.
This is really important in business. You wouldn’t do the merger or acquisition unless there was some value-add on both sides, right? So the value-add was there, the financials and legal repercussions were vetted, and it proceeded. Now you’re together. It’s going to be hard but you’re together against a common enemy — your competition, or the idea you’re trying to take down. When Google buys a company, for example, hopefully it’s fitting into the matrix of “organizing the world’s information.” The acquired company has common enemies with Google now — other tech rivals, but also processes that are making it hard for people to acquire and organize information.
That’s the five-step path to your Bernie Moment, then:
Celebrate
Accept fate and be honest
Transition
Move on
Find a common enemy
It worked for Bernie — he’s continuing his movement — and it can work for your business, whether you’re Satya Nadella and Jeff Weiner or two guys merging local ice cream stores. Just think about the process and try not to miss your Bernie moment!
I started to make this blog post one of my #SoapBox rants. It is in fact a topic about which I am passionate. Largely because I have seen really bad behaviors and would love to do my part to get rid of them. I’ve blogged about Trust, Empowerment, and Accountability, but never really dug deep into accountability. While I think many organizations are starting to do a really good job at defining expectations and holding people accountable, it is still too often the manager that is calling the tasks and managing the tough conversations. A few people have really argued that peers can play as active a role in this and they should. And I agree. So this post is about holding each other accountable, across silos and organizational hierarchies.
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There is a dirty little secret in many organizations that teams oftentimes don’t want to collaborate, driven perhaps by the idea that while we do a lot of our work in teams, we still promote individuals. If you follow the two-pizza rule and assume most teams are 8-10 members dispatched to work on a business need, in a given fiscal year probably 1-2 of those people (at most) will get advanced. If you’re in the 7-9 who don’t get advanced and that keeps happening, you might eventually become a bit disgruntled about the idea of constant team-building.
Here’s the other problem with teams besides the motivation aspect: how they’re run. Oftentimes, teams are very driven by process — which is a good thing, as it sets rules and expectations for how the work will get done — but there’s a large concern over who owns the process, i.e. the team lead. This is also good in one respect (accountability), but bad in another — and ironically, it’s also accountability.
I saw this recently in an organization. One of the leaders designed a portfolio dashboard for project management in his group. It was pretty awesome — there was easy-to-access, intuitive information about timelines, budgets, due dates, and roles. Here was the problem: the tool was created by someone not responsible for creating that tool based on the operating model and org structure (it should have been the PMO). Because the team wasn’t getting what they wanted from the PMO, they did an end-run and created a better solution. Of course, this type of action can lead to a decent amount of politics and finger-pointing over responsibility, as opposed to a focus on being the most productive we could be.
Sadly in many cases, the way we structure teams is typically representative of the way we structure whole organizations. Hierarchy defines decision-making authority in the most formal sense. Since hierarchy may never die — despite what we’ve been told about millennials — we should, in a way, get used to this.
Think for a second about how ineffective this can be. You’ve probably seen this cycle a dozen or more times in different jobs you’ve had, but here it goes: an employee escalates an issue to a team manager, who then must go and talk to a peer manager. The peer manager has to go talk to the employee, who presents his/her perspective to the peer manager — who now has to go back to the team manager and explain the perspective. The team manager can now go to the employee. It’s like a massive version of reply all chain threads, but in real life and not in your inbox. It kills time and saps productivity, and yet, that’s typically how we deal with team management and issue escalation.
Escalations and circles of perceived accountability should be the exception and not the rule. I think of my work this way: 95% of real change comes from the direct reports of my direct reports. They do the actual work. I should be focusing on strategy and growth. If I’m spending all my time quashing escalations, we’re all in a free fall.
The basic principle is simple, but very hard to execute: anyone on a team can hold anyone else accountable if it’s in the best interest of the team. And yes, that means you can cross hierarchical lines and call out someone that outranks you.
In the weakest teams, there is absolutely no accountability: You’ve probably seen this a few times wherever you work, or in previous jobs.
In mediocre, middle-of-the-road teams, the boss/team lead is the source of accountability: This team might get a few things done, which is good, but there’s a tendency towards HIPPO Management (highest paid person’s opinion) and other flaws of ideation.
In high-performing teams, peers manage each other: This is hard to arrive at because of how people tend to contextualize bosses and hierarchy, but actually drives the best results.
How can you apply this to your team?
Focus on team composition a lot more
You need to think a little more thoroughly about team composition. Oftentimes teams are thrown together based on a few silos that have ownership of a product or service or project. There can often not be much thought given to who’s involved and what role they’d play. As a result, you have a random smattering of individuals and a team lead. That team could come together and achieve some great business results, but I wouldn’t necessarily throw $20 on that happening in Vegas. It’s more likely that role confusion will lead to overlapping responsibilities, which will lead to team members chasing their tails, and ultimately the team lead will be on the hook for the flaws.
2. Hire the curious as much as (or more than) you hire the smart
Universal accountability will tend to work better on teams with a high degree of self-awareness and curiosity, as those teams are more willing to embrace changes to conventional team management models. Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law, has written and spoken extensively about what makes teams smart or dumb — and while he embraces universal accountability, he admits the bigger driving force of a successful team is ‘C-Factor,’ or the ability to embrace new ideas while working together. Hire people that are comfortable with change and ambiguity as long as they are learning. Hire the curious.
3. Reward problem solving without escalation
Perhaps as importantly, publicly scorn premature or unnecessary escalations. When I was a kid, my parents often told me “everyone hates a tattletale”. Of course, they did not mean to say I should never tell them if something awful happened to me. They simply wanted me to learn to self-heal and self-resolve conflicts as much as possible. Little did I know then they were teaching me a life lesson. The more you can solve problems direct with the source, the more effective you will be. Celebrate the problem solvers.
4. Model the behavior
You likely have issues with your peers as well, and your frustration is very visible to your teams. Show them you hold your peers accountable and they are more likely to model this behavior with their peers.
In an average day, you will only have so many productive hours outside of meetings and required client events, so you need to make the most of them. Every hour spent dealing with someone else’s drama or problems is an hour you could be driving value. Try to build a culture of universal accountability and see how much more you can get done.
Ever been on a team where Universal accountability was the norm? Could it work in YOUR organization? As always, I would love to hear your thoughts.
“If you read the papers, you’ll see that people are hired for what they know, and they’re fired for who they are. Hiring for knowledge is a mistake management makes all the time.” — Unattributed, World 50 Member
So, I heard it again the other day. What, you ask? I heard the famous “he just wasn’t a good fit” for the team. The problem is, I get it. But that word has always driven me crazy because it was often used to deny people of different racial, religious, and gender backgrounds from roles. “Not a good fit” meant not part of the same country club or socioeconomic circles. But, as much as I hate the word, “fit” does matter. But in my case, I choose to define fit as having similar character and values. Character and values transcend race, gender, religion, etc. — and they are very important in hiring decisions. The fact is, outcomes are greater when you hire employees with values in sync with the values you hold as a manager, and more importantly, with the general values of the company. You are adding valuable people and you want them to be happy, engaged, and aligned.
Why this matters
Lots of really smart and really successful people talk about this yet some of the lowly C-suite mortals like me often neglect it.
Sir Richard Branson, billionaire mogul of Virgin Group: “If you can find people who are fun, friendly, caring and love helping others you are on to a winner. …. Personality is the key.” Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and the increasingly ubiquitous Tesla car: “[My biggest mistake is] weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality…it matters whether someone has a good heart.”
These men are incredibly professionally and financially successful, as are their organizations. They recognize that values tie to performance. In fact, character and values oftentimes tie back to a new hire’s attitude. Mark Murphy, the author of Hiring for Attitude, conducted a study based on 20,000 new hires. He found that roughly half failed within the first 18 months on the job, and 89% of those failures came from problems related to attitude.
Character and values set the culture of an organization. Character and values drive the attitude of an employee.
See how this is crucially important?
Of course, hiring for character and values is tough, and it’s understandable why so many people do not intentionally do so. The way most companies set up headcount protocols means that when a role is open, a crucial metric becomes “time to hire.” When you combine the regular daily responsibilities of HR and hiring managers, you can have rushed processes based on video screens, 30-minute interviews with mostly generic questions (“What’s your biggest weakness?”). Furthermore, applicant tracking systems weed out potentially good candidates based on keywords and character does not always come through in print or catch phrases. Hiring for character and values takes time, and time is our most precious asset.
So, is it achievable?
How can you hire for Character and Values
Here are some quick tips:
Use LinkedIn recommendations.
I look closely to see what people have said about a key recruit. How does he or she lead, make decisions, and team with others? Is there a high level of energy and passion in her effort? I look for works like “trust”, “integrity”, and “fun.” If they do not have any, ask for references from a broad group and ensure you get detailed feedback on character and values. References are hard because they’re very curated — obviously if a past manager didn’t like an employee, he/she probably won’t post that on LinkedIn because of professionalism. (And if he/she does, the employee has the option not to show it publicly.) But looking at crucial words is valuable.
It’s ok to have a social component of the interview process.
Doesn’t have to be drinks, but if you are going to be in the trenches with someone, you must spend time with them outside of the office. Over coffee. A breakfast. Drinks. Plan, within HR rules of course, an interaction outside of the office where the plan in not to talk specifically about the company for which you are hiring. Talk about what matters to the potential employee. What makes him or her happy?
Ask probing questions about the “how”.
Resumes and bios often highlight the “what” and I find it surprising when interviewers spend half or more of an interview asking for a restatement of what is clearly written. I want to know how you delivered something as much as I want to know what you deliver. John Wooden is one of the most successful coaches of all-time in any sport — nine NCAA titles, 88 straight wins at one point — and a major psychological research study done around his processes showed that he overwhelmingly focused on the “how” as opposed to the “what.” Again, model success — it can work in hiring.
Always ask what they disliked.
It’s tough, and yes you will get canned answers sometimes. The famous “I just hated that guy that did not work to my level of expectations. It is hard for me to deal with people who have less of a work ethic”. BS. We all read that same book. I REALLY want to know who or what you didn’t like. If a lot of what you DO NOT like exists in my company, we would both be miserable if you join me. You would not be happy and therefore your performance would be subpar and thus I would not be happy. Work is a two-way street: you get money in exchange for performance, but the performance is within a context of co-workers, clarity of information, job description, skill set, and more. If you know you’re not a good fit for certain types of offices or organizations, be honest about that. You hurt everyone — from yourself to future co-workers — when you try to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Have them meet their peers.
For some reason, early in my career I came to expect to meet several peers during the interview process. They were interviewing me as much as I was interviewing them. As I advanced, I noted that these kind of interactions became more sporadic. If you are hiring, make sure to add a couple of peers to the interview schedule. If you are contemplating joining a company, demand to speak with your peers. Quick story about this from a collaborator of mine: after business school, he interviewed for a job based in Texas. He met a few (2-3) of the Texas-based team. Within a week or two of starting the gig, though, he realized he pretty much only worked with the Seattle-based team of the same company. They had barely met him and had no context for him, and he was sitting 1,200 miles away from them. That creates reduced productivity and bad teams, which shouldn’t be a goal for anyone. So meeting peers is important, but make sure they’re meeting the right peers.
Obtain senior buy-in
This comes up in any business article, of course — you have to make sure there’s senior buy-in on any major decisions in an organization. Hiring is maybe the most major decision; it’s half your money going out, and your people are your greatest strategic advantage. Hiring can sometimes be ignored by the top executives — they view it as the domain of HR or specific hiring managers, and because it’s harder to measure, they don’t focus on it as much. Hiring needs to be a focus of your executives. They need to be regularly telling people around the org what culture, values, and character traits they want to see. It needs to be commonplace for a C-suite leader to tell a middle manager what values should be in the company. Otherwise it becomes the domain of specific silos, and finance has a certain type of employee vs. marketing with another vs. Ops with another. Then when those teams need to collaborate, it can be a mess. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. And you can avoid it by aligning around character and values.
I’ve spoken about the perfect team traits and the importance of thinking of every employee as allies on a tour of duty. If you are going to make a significant hiring decision, bringing on another comrade on the tour, why not spend the extra time to make it the right decision. Hire for “fit” for character and values. You will be happier. they will be happier. And, the company will benefit for the extra time you took.
Technology has made many things about our lives better. As a geeky, technology evangelizing, digital dude, I would say technology has made MOST things better. We have quicker communication (sometimes I wish this was not the case). Some work processes are more effective (sadly not all). We can keep costs down in businesses. Scale happens faster. Connections with clients are richer. Analytics more powerful in decision making. And technology has touched essentially every industry. Customer demand shifts, competition from just about everywhere, and an increasingly challenging operational and regulatory environment mean that every company, from the most “manual” to the most high tech are all in essence technology companies. 
1. Analytics: All businesses are running on data now, or trying to. Unfortunately, the talent for understanding, analyzing, and presenting data 
4. Understand mobile and targeting: 
5. Demonstrate intellectual curiosity: I am amazed at how many people recruiting for roles today are concerned about “job hoppers” and, perhaps related, how many companies do not encourage continuous movement within a company. IBM, despite recent financial challenges, has created a culture that encourages and almost requires regular movement. For those of you who exercise, you know that half the battle is about continuously “surprising” your muscles, switching it up so your body never gets complacent. Your brain is the same and if a company does not commit to providing you opportunities to stretch and grow it, you will get bored. So shouldn’t every interview include questions that probe intellectual curiosity? In an era where 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years, I want people that are fascinated by change, not just accepting of it. I blogged a while ago about 
Let me start out this post by saying it’s NOT about politics. In fact, let me repeat that one more time right up top: it’s not about politics. It’s about how a figure in the 2016 political landscape — nope, not Trump — can teach you something about business and culture within organizations.
In a post on the Harvard Business Review blog, “
