Leadership Out of Balance

Leadership is often described as the act of leading a group of people or an organization. Leading well requires knowledge, skill, and an ability to balance the immediate gratification of the near term with the security of the long term.

According to author and organizational consultant Warren Bennis, leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. He also said the difference between a manager and a leader is that a manager does things right, while a leader does the right things.

Today, great leadership is rare and all too often personified in the media as famous wealthy men running big companies that return strong shareholder value. But are huge financial returns the ultimate sign of great leadership?

The corporate world generously compensates CEOs focused on quarterly earnings and meeting Wall Street expectations often at the expense of doing what’s right for the customer, the employees and ensuring the company is around in the long term. Though these CEOs may spout “customer focus” and “concern for our employees” in speeches, annual reports and corporate websites, these words seem incongruent with their actions.

In politics, our elected officials should be concerned with governing, but they currently spend about half their workday raising money in order to ensure they are re-elected. The U.S. congress currently has a 14% approval rating, which means we now trust used car salesmen more than our so-called representatives.

Today’s imbalance in leadership seems to stem from too much focus on what’s in it for me rather than what’s in it for us. Leaders who focus primarily on their own self-interest cannot possibly instill the confidence and loyalty necessary to lead others most effectively.

In Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, author Simon Sinek suggests that the best organizations foster trust and cooperation because their leaders build what he calls a Circle of Safety. This separates the security inside the team from the challenges outside.

This Circle of Safety enables teams to be stable, adaptive and confident where every member feels they belong and are focused on the right things.

Part of the challenge in creating such a circle requires leaders at every level to maintain balance of four chemicals found in our bodies. These chemicals control our feelings, which are the primary drivers for all our decision-making whether we are aware of it or not.

Chemicals such as endorphins and dopamine function to get us where we need to go as individuals. Endorphins provide the “runner’s high,” which are able to mask pain and enable us to complete a marathon or complete a work project well into the night. Dopamine provides a feeling of satisfaction once we complete an important task on our to-do list. It provides incentive for progress toward reaching our goals.

These two are what Sinek refers to as the selfish chemicals and they provide us with short-term rewards, which can motivate us to accomplish great things and, under the right conditions, can also become addictive.

On the other hand, serotonin and oxytocin work to help strengthen our social bonds so we are more likely to work together and cooperate well. Serotonin and oxytocin are what Sinek describes as the selfless chemicals and they are sorely missing in leadership today.

Serotonin is responsible for the pride we feel when those we care for achieve great things. As the boss, serotonin works to encourage us to serve the employees we are responsible for. And as the employee, serotonin encourages us to work hard to make the boss proud.

Serotonin more than any of the others is seen as the leadership chemical.

Oxytocin is the chemical that helps us direct how vulnerable we can afford to make ourselves. This social compass helps determine when it’s safe to open up and trust or when we should hold back. This might be the drug most closely aligned with emotional intelligence.

Oxytocin makes us better problem solvers and enables us to accomplish more in groups than we can alone. It has also been found to contribute to us living longer.

The goal of any leader should be to find balance. If you remain addicted primarily to endorphins and dopamine, no matter how rich and powerful you become, you will likely feel lonely and unfulfilled. On the other hand, if you are focused too much on serotonin and oxytocin, you may lack the measurable goals or ambition necessary to reach important feelings of accomplishment.

Leadership in balance requires focusing on the present and the future. It means serving customers and employees as well as shareholders. And it is a balance of short-term growth and long-term viability.

Is Your Personality Impacting Your Career?

How much is your personality contributing to or detracting from success in your career?

One’s personality can directly impact their career because it can attract or repel other people. This matters in all relationships and it definitely impacts interpersonal relations in the workplace.

Have you been told of specific behaviors in annual reviews, 360 assessments or one-on-one conversations that are directly keeping you from being considered for a promotion or a raise? Are you unable to secure professional references that can attest to your personality as anything other than an asset to your suitability for a job?

If the answer to either of these is affirmative, you may want to consider gaining insight into the specifics of your personality and seeking advice on how to go about changing them.

The Big Five personality model divides personality into five broad categories: openness (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious), conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless), agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. analytical/detached), neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident), and extroversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved). Within each of these are specific traits or behaviors.

There are advantages and disadvantages to being oriented to either side in each of these categories, but some are more important than others in certain occupations. For example, a sales representative who is detached and reserved is unlikely to do as well as one who is friendly and outgoing.

It should also come as no surprise that studies have found that people who are more conscientious do better both in school and at work. Those who score high on agreeableness and low on neuroticism also tend to have more satisfying and stable relationships.

And extroversion was related positively to salary level, promotions, and career satisfaction while neuroticism was related negatively to career satisfaction, according to The Five-Factor Model of Personality and Career Success by Scott E. Seibert and Maria L. Kraimer.

According to Brent W. Roberts, PhD in what he calls the Maturity Principle, we all naturally become more conscientious and less neurotic as we age from 20 to 65. Most of us also tend to become more agreeable, more responsible and more emotionally stable as we age.

It turns out personality is about 50% innate and 50% learned, according to Christopher Soto, a research psychologist. This means you have a great deal of control over changing it should you decide to do so.

An emotional intelligence assessment can help zero in on your overall self-awareness. Specifically, it can measure your ability for self-reflection, self-regulation and empathy while in stressful workplace situations. This greater awareness can then help you figure out what you may want to do about it.

Changing any behavior should be done in small steps and takes discipline and dedication. Enlisting others or even a leadership coach can be helpful in order to give you the support you need to be successful.

Though the tendency is to focus on education, training and experience in order to move forward in our careers, it is often our behavior, communication style, and overall personality that may be worthy of consideration.

Better understanding how your personality contributes to or diminishes your relationships at work, can help you decide whether or not this is something you want to change. Though it’s difficult, we are all capable of changing our behavior. And it could make all the difference in your success at work and elsewhere.

How ENTJs Can Become Better Leaders

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is often used to improve overall performance in organizations. This tool can help workers gain self-awareness, improve emotional intelligence, and better understand how they—as well as those around them—operate in the workplace.

No one of the 16 types identified in the MBTI are better than any other, although there are studies that suggest some types are better suited for certain jobs than others.

A good many of my executive coaching clients tend to be in the ENTJ (extrovert, intuitive, thinking, judger) quadrant, which is quite common among leaders.

ENTJs make good leaders because of their innate ability to direct groups of people, according to Isabel Briggs Myers and Peter B. Myers, authors of Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type. They tend to be self-driven, motivating, energetic, assertive, confident and competitive. ENTJs are unusually influential and organized, yet they may judge others by their own tough standards.

Famous ENTJs include Aristotle, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Margaret Thatcher, Jack Welch and Bill Gates. ENTJs are also the most rare of the 16 types representing just 2% to 5% of males and 1% to 3% of females in the United States.

A study called “Personality Type in Leadership” by the Center of Creative Leadership found that, although the extrovert/introvert and intuitive/sensation preference were equally represented, thinking and judging were more predominate in leaders. This does not necessarily mean that feeling and perceiving are not valuable traits in leaders, however, the structure and values of most organizations today tend to favor logical and decisive behaviors.

ENTJs are primarily concerned with making things happen and may not fully appreciate that other people may take a little longer to understand or may not be as forthcoming or direct, and assume that silence means agreement.

The ENTJ doesn’t generally understand emotions, preferring to deal with issues as problems or concepts. Therefore, trying to appeal to the ENTJs emotional side may not be the best way to resolve issues.

Feeling
There are important differences between thinkers and feelers, and ENTJs would do well to keep these in mind in order to improve relationships with those who are identified as feelers instead of thinkers. These include:

• Feelers tend to be sympathetic, while thinkers focus on logic.
• Feelers are more interested in people than things.
• Feelers are more people-oriented, responding more easily to people’s values.
• Feelers recognize and acknowledge their own as well as others’ emotions and know that this is strength, not a weakness.

 

ENTJs are more likely to analyze and apply logic with interpersonal issues, which can annoy and puzzle the feeling types. No matter what the problem, ENTJs need to factor in the human element in decision-making. They would do well to consider consulting other types for their opinions before making a decision. And they should take note of their own needs and feelings.

All of this, of course, will slow down the ENTJ’s decisiveness, but in the long term will serve them well.

Perceiving
Though judgers may view perceivers as aimless drifters, they need to understand that perceivers simply want more information before making decisions. In addition:

• What the judger does aloud, the perceiver does within.
• Perceivers can make decisions, but their inclination is to focus on gathering information in order to keep their options open.
• Perceivers see structure as more limiting than enabling.
• Perceivers are more tolerant of other people’s differences and will adapt to fit into whatever the situation requires.

 

ENTJs must develop their perceptive ability and suspend the judgment function just long enough to give perception a chance. They must continue to use judging on themselves, but not on other people. If ENTJs let thinking-judgment dominate every aspect of their lives, their feeling will be too suppressed to be of any use.

If an unexpected explosion of temper shows up, there’s a good possibility that the ENTJ needs to allow space for feeling now and again. This will provide a constructive outlet before reaching the boiling point.

Though the ENTJ preference is quite common in leaders, these people need to recognize the importance of the feeling and perceiving functions both in themselves as well as others in the workplace. A preference should be only that and finding a balance within oneself will help ENTJs grow into even stronger leaders. Appreciating the preference others have for feelings and perceiving will also help them find value in those who possess these gifts.

Predictive Analysis to Motivate Employees

Predictive analysis in human resources is becoming a lot more helpful in determining how well-suited potential employees may be for a particular company and a specific job.

What can it tell us about employee engagement?

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article regarding a soon to be published study by Deloitte Consulting LLP, about 5% of companies with 25,000 or more employees are now using predictive analysis in human resources.

This analytical information can go a long way towards learning about who to hire and for what positions to better ensure they are likely to succeed in the job and stay at the company.

At Google, where numbers are crunched for just about everything, they use analytics to identify the skills, behaviors and values of ideal candidates for specific roles. Humans still scan resumes, but this is no longer the primary method for finding the right people.

ConAgra Foods has gone further and used analytic software to help predict which key employees were likely to leave the company and why. They studied departments with particularly high turnover as well as those with low turnover and looked at more than 200 factors that may contribute to employees leaving the company.

The results surprised them as two of the strongest indicators as to whether an employee would likely leave the company were his or her relationship with their supervisor and the degree to which they were recognized for their work. Compensation wasn’t even in the top ten.

As I wrote in a previous post, what employees are looking for can vary greatly from what managers assume they want. This disparity can greatly diminish productivity as well as cause employees to leave the company. Learning to correct for this disparity can improve employee engagement and organizational performance.

One should expect that data will be used more and more for determining existing employees’ suitability for promotions and succession planning as well as the overall impact on them through mergers and acquisitions.

Studying human capital data may not only help verify the difference between what we think and what actually does motivate employees, it may help us understand how to best engage them as well.

In the same way the Hawthorne effect demonstrated at least a minimal short-term positive impact by simply paying attention to employees, I think predictive analysis could be used to generate some greater understanding of how to best engage employees. And this can have much longer term implications.

Ideas to do this may include finding effective ways to first quantifiably measure employee engagement as well as emotional intelligence and job satisfaction levels. Using this data, organizations can then analyze how it compares to the productivity of individual employees. If a direct correlation can be drawn from the results, then creating effective ways to raise any of the variables may result in a predictable increase in employee productivity.

This is not meant to reduce employees into statistics, but only as a way of verifying in a quantitative way what we may already suspect qualitatively.

Understanding and verifying how to best engage and motivate employees can then effectively raise an organization’s productivity, reduce the high cost of turnover and make for a better workplace environment.

Fostering Innovation in the Workplace

Today there is a great deal of talk about the need for more employee collaboration. This is because collaboration can lead to creative solutions and is directly tied to innovation.

Though we often attribute innovative ideas to a single person, rarely do these ideas occur in isolation. Finding novel solutions to problems or creating new market opportunities requires people sharing and discovering through direct and open interaction with others.

The physical environment can certainly play a role in encouraging innovation. Here are some examples of what organizations are currently doing.

• Google is designing their new corporate headquarters to maximize casual employee conversations, which is exactly how they came up with innovations like Gmail and Street View.

• Zappos created a new headquarters and deliberately provided employees with smaller workspaces and break rooms, not only to save money, but to encourage people to physically bump into each other. They hope this will lead to more spontaneous and productive interactions.

• Many companies are also providing common work areas that enable employees to mingle and chat with the hope that more ideas will result.

• National Public Radio has “Serendipity Days” where employees from different departments come together to deliberately think about new ideas and projects over a two-day period. The focus is on getting employees to work with people who they wouldn’t normally work with as a way to alter their current thinking and broaden perspective.

• Some companies are asking employees to swap jobs for a few months in order to better understand each other’s work, and also seek different approaches to existing ways of doing things.

• Yahoo recently put a ban on telecommuting as way to encourage incidental encounters in hallways and the cafeteria that would likely not occur if these employees worked from home.

Clearly these physical interventions may create an environment where people can collaborate and innovate together, but innovation also requires getting the right people together and having a culture that encourages the innovating process.

Here are some ideas on how organizations can encourage innovation:

1. Hire the right people. Look for a cultural fit as well as passion in the people you hire. Don’t underestimate the importance of emotional intelligence, which is vital for effective relationships, but may not show up on resumes. Seek out curious people who look beyond presenting problems and find sustainable solutions.
2. Foster a team approach. Don’t let an individual’s desire for career advancement override the team’s ability to succeed. Remember the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
3. Enable brainstorming time. This means not shooting down what may appear at first to be a bad idea. Real innovation occurs when people are free to ask stupid questions, challenge assumptions, and try out what hasn’t been done before.
4. Encourage risk taking. True creativity requires the opportunity to make mistakes and not be penalized for it. This means organizations must not only tolerate mistakes or false starts, but encourage them as the natural process for reaching innovative success.
5. Foster a playful environment. Innovation demands that people follow their interests and play with ideas that may fall outside traditional thinking. While this may at times appear silly and unproductive, it is the exact environment where ideas can grow.
6. Welcome diversity and conflicting opinions. Many organizations are conflict avoidant; they are also less likely to be innovative. That’s because coming up with new ideas is often messy and requires people to see and hear what is beyond their current point of view. Stay in the mess in order to let the best ideas surface.

Outside the workplace, there are organizations like Maker Faire that encourage innovation. “Maker Faire features innovation and experimentation across the spectrum of science, engineering, art, performance and craft.” In other words, it encourages people from many disciplines to take something old and make something new.

Regardless of the industry, organizations that provide products or services need to continually innovate in order to gain or maintain a competitive edge. Fostering an environment that encourages collaboration with a corporate culture and policies that support it can enable this innovation to occur.

 

Workplace & Leadership: This I Believe

In my work with organizations both as an employee and external consultant, I have learned (and continue to learn) many things over the years. Many of these have evolved or been entirely reversed, which is indicative of the fact that we are living at a very dynamic time.

For example, in a recent article in Harvard Business Review magazine, Michael J. Mauboussin writes about how organizations are so often using the wrong metrics to measure success. The continual focus on earnings per share instead of other metrics and statistics prevents these companies from fully understanding their business. It’s time for business leaders to adapt their thinking.

In this blog post, I thought I would simply state some of what I believe with regard to the workplace and leadership. Although these statements are likely to continue evolving over time, I believe they will retain a kernel of truth that should remain constant.

I am indebted to many great business leaders and theorists for these ideas and I apologize in advance for a lack of attribution.

• Most people want to do their very best at work.

• More autonomy for how the work gets done leads to greater employee satisfaction and higher productivity.

• Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them. They hire motivated people and inspire them.

• Character traits like zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity are common among great employees, yet are rarely advertised for or even looked for when seeking and interviewing candidates.

• Emotional intelligence may not get you the job, but it will undoubtedly keep you in the job and help you get promoted.

• Getting the right people focused on the right task is the most important objective for any organization to reach its goals.

• Focusing on employees first is what will make customers happy and this leads to happy shareholders.

• The role of a great leader is not to come up with great ideas. Instead, a great leader should create an environment in which great ideas can happen.

• Everyone has the capacity for leadership no matter the position.

• Leadership development should not be restricted to executives, but implemented throughout every level of the organization.

• Most of the billions of dollars companies invest in leadership development fall short of success because the programs are so heavily focused on data and assessment gathering and very little on people and processes.

• A high level of trust in the workplace is directly related to greater productivity, higher profitability and more engaged employees.

• Building trust and accountability are the most important things a manager should work on in order to get the most out his or her people.

• Praising workers in a meaningful way is a simple, yet highly effective means of raising employee satisfaction and overall productivity.

I welcome your thoughts and comments as well as other statements with regard to what you believe in order to extend the conversation.

Negative Emotions Impede Organizational Productivity

In your workplace you probably know a Debbie Downer or someone who is always able point out what is wrong and how the glass is really half empty.

Such a constant negative perspective can have a contagious effect on others and should be monitored so it doesn’t impede productivity throughout the organization.

Emotions, both positive and negative, can and do play a role at work even though we may think we are effectively holding them in check. This is because emotions impact our behavior—whether we want to admit it or not—and others see this behavior.

I grew up in a family where sarcasm was considered a high comedic art form. In reality, sarcasm is typically ridicule or mockery and usually used for destructive purposes. Sarcasm usually has some underlying and unexpressed emotion attached to it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky considered sarcasm a cry of pain when he said it is “usually the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.”

In a recent Harvard Business Review post by Tony Schwartz, he wrote how the negative emotions of a new executive at his company altered the corporate culture such that the entire organization was more negative. It wasn’t that this leader was only being critical, but he was so “singularly focused on what was wrong that he lost sight of the bigger picture, including his own negative impact on others.”

This emotional contagion resulted in others taking on these same negative feelings and sapping the vital energy from the organization. Ultimately, this leader had to be let go because of the ramifications his negative outlook had on the leadership team and overall employees.

I am not advocating wearing blinders to what is wrong within an organization. Instead, it’s important to seek out what is indeed wrong and then have an optimistic vision on how to improve things in order to get to a sustainable change.

We also need to keep in mind how our behavior and attitude can impact those around us. Even though we may not feel we are being overly critical when pointing out flaws in a product design or service procedure, others may feel it is. Sometimes this is only a matter of being more tactful in our delivery.

And this is not to say I mean avoid being authentic at work. Authenticity is vital to your emotional well-being, and emotional intelligence can help you understand and regulate your emotions as well as be aware of the emotions of other people. Then you can choose how to appropriately respond to any given situation.

Negativity is a powerful force and can spread quickly throughout an organization, especially if it is the predominant emotion witnessed in leaders. Many leaders will defend this perspective as they believe it is a powerful motivator, and it may very well be for some employees and for some period of time.

But in the long run and for the majority of people, a negative perspective will suck the energy and productivity from an organization. It will reduce employee engagement and it will harm the bottom line.

Is there someone in your organization draining it of energy? Does the leader exhibit generally positive or negative emotions and how have these influenced his or her management team and the entire organization?

Increased Productivity Through Mindfulness

In this global economy with virtual meetings, social networking, and hyper-competitiveness, it is encouraging to see a large corporation choosing to embrace mindfulness. This mindfulness training is seen as a means to increase productivity as well as employee happiness.

Google’s popular course called “Search Inside Yourself” was designed to teach emotional intelligence through practical, real-world meditation. But this is not about sitting in the lotus position reciting “Ommmmm.” Instead it is a pragmatic approach for raising awareness in order to be more productive and happy.

Based on curriculum from his popular class which has been offered to Google engineers for the past five years, Chade-Meng Tan wrote a funny and practical book titled, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace).

What I find particularly compelling about Chade-Meng’s book and course is that he applies these ancient principles in the 21^st century workplace. He believes that we can all achieve inner peace (and ultimately world peace) as well as become more productive in the workplace setting.

According to Chade-Meng, the course has been able to provide the knowledge and practices that can increase creativity, productivity and happiness. The book promises readers will learn to:

• Calm your mind on demand
• Improve your concentration and creativity
• Perceive mental and emotional processes with increased clarity
• Discover that increased confidence is something that can arise naturally in a trained mind
• Develop optimism and resilience necessary to thrive
• Deliberately improve empathy with practice
• Learn that social skills are highly trainable

This mindfulness is developed through learning the skills of emotional intelligence, which I’ve written about in previous posts. Based on the neuroplasticity of the brain, what we pay attention to gets done. What we think, do and pay attention to actually changes the structure and function of our brains. And like any training, practice is required for this to take full effect.

Mindfulness, according to Jon Cabat-Zinn, means to pay attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally. This enables you not only to become calm, but also more and creative.

A successful practice supports reflection over reactivity, encourages feeling your feelings rather than acting on them, and opens awareness to what is really going on. This means slowing down to notice. Any mindfulness is good mindfulness.

If Google has seen fit to offer this free course to its employees for more than five years, they certainly must have vetted its overall effectiveness. Analyzing qualitative data such as happiness is extremely difficult, but I suspect Google has found that those who have completed the course are in fact more productive.

And I strongly believe happy employees are indeed more productive employees.

You can see an hour-long presentation about this by Chade-Meng in this YouTube video.

Working for the Best Companies

Fortune magazine’s recent “100 Best Companies to Work For” list made me curious as to how they determine such a list. I also wanted to know what traits these companies look for in potential employees.

The 100 Best Companies list was compiled through a partnership with the Great Places to Work institute, and they determine ranking based on the results from survey questions sent to a random sample of 260,000 employees from the 280 companies that participated.

To be eligible for the list, a company had to be at least seven years old and have more than 1,000 U.S. employees.

Two-thirds of the questions from the institute’s Trust Index Asseessment & Employee Survey were related to attitudes about management credibility, job satisfaction and camaraderie. The other third were based on responses to the institute’s Culture Audit, which includes detailed questions about pay and benefit programs and a series of open-ended questions about hiring practices, methods of internal communication, training, recognition programs and diversity efforts.

This is obviously not a list compiled based on popularity, exceptional salaries or who has the most celebrated CEO at a given time.

The goal of the list is to help “tie Trust Index metrics to your organization’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) so that you can understand the relationship between your organization’s business goals and your employees’ workplace experiences.”

This sounds like a worthy goal, especially in light of recent news about the deplorable working conditions in the Foxconn factory in China.

Companies are are broken down into groups such as the number of employees and include sub-groups such as job growth, low turnover, no layoffs, percentage of women, percentage of minorities, and all stars—companies that have been on the list every year since its inception in 1998. This includes 13 companies like SAS Institute (3), Wegman’s Food Markets (4), REI (8), Goldman Sachs (33), Microsoft (76) and Nordstroms (61).

Best perks can include things like health care (14 of the companies pay 100% of their employee health-care premiums), child care, work-life balance, telecommuting, sabbaticals, and unusual perks (Google has nap pods and in-house eyebrow shaping).

In this economy perhaps most important is the category of who is hiring and most of these companies are now looking for talent. In fact, there are more than 56,000 openings currently available in these 100 companies.

Human resource and recruiting personnel at these companies say they are looking for candidates with traits like passion, attitude, communication skills, collaboration, an interest in learning and values that align with our organization.

Here are some examples:

At Google (1)“. . . in addition to looking for strong cognitive ability and meaningful work experience,” says Yolanda Mangolini, director, global diversity, talent & inclusion. “We also want people with interesting and unique accomplishments—sports, music, starting a business, or writing a book, for example. Cultural fit and diversity are very important to us.”

Whole Foods Market (32) say they hire for attitude and train for skill. “If we can find applicants who have strong customer service skills and high energy, and are enthusiastic about the organic and natural foods industry (and who love food), then they are a fit for us,” according to Janet Lapaire, CHRP team member service coordinator.

Adobe’s (41) VP of global talent acquisition Jeff Vijungco says, “We want candidates to share some of the biggest failures that have shaped who they are as a leader because we celebrate failures as defining moments in an employee’s professional development.”

Intel’s (46) greater Americas staffing manager Cindi Harper, says they look for candidates “with behavioral characteristics that extend beyond their specific educational training.”

Brent Bultema, director of recruitment strategies at Mayo Clinic (71) says “strong candidates are people whose personal values align with those of Mayo Clinic. Individuals who are collaborative, collegial, professional, respectful and passionate will be a good fit.”

“Cisco (90) looks for people who are strong collaborators and communicators,” says Bronwyn White, director of human resources. “We look for people with a track record of continuous learning and who are prepared to question the status quo within their discipline. We value flexibility and promote work-life integration while making sure that we focus on results.”

“I have the great fortune to work with people everyday that love what they do and where they work” says Jack McCarthy, a recruiter at CarMax (91). “We want to see that same passion from candidates throughout our entire interview process. My advice to candidates is along the same lines; figure out what you do really well and enjoy, and find a company that has the right culture fit.”

In addition to general technical competency for the specified job, all of these Top 100 Companies are looking for candidates who have behavioral competencies also known as emotional intelligence or EQ.

The EQ traits they look for can include things like interpersonal communication, collaboration, empathy, creative problem solving, and conflict negotiation and resolution. And these companies want people who fit in with their organization’s values and culture because that is what keeps them on this best companies list.

EQ traits are not easily conveyed via a resume and therefore it is vital that they be demonstrated throughout the interviewing process. If you are serious about joining one of these companies, keep this in mind as you navigate the opportunity.

Redefined Leadership through Greater Gender Diversity

Women have made great strides succeeding in every profession, yet still find little opportunity in the executive office and corporate boardrooms.

By 2009 women made up more than half of America’s labor force, however, only 12 women were CEOs or presidents of Fortune 500 companies and just 25 of Fortune 1000 companies.

Recently, former Ebay leader Meg Whitman was appointed CEO of HP and Virginia Rometty will soon take over as the first woman CEO of IBM. But these are anomalies as only 3.2% of CEOs in the 3,049 publicly traded companies analyzed by GMI were women.

According to a 2010 study, men hold 82% of seats in Fortune 100 corporate boardrooms and an even higher percentage in Fortune 500 companies. Women and minorities have actually been losing boardseats in large corporations since 2004.

A case could be made for increasing gender diversity not only to provide greater opportunities for women in business, but also to improve overall business.  This is not to say women necessarily make better leaders than men. I only suggest that the yardstick we use to identify successful business leaders may need to be recalibrated.

Leadership qualities in business include such personal behaviors as decisiveness, goal-directedness, and performance-orientation, and we should complement those with social behaviors like relational awareness, emotional intelligence, inclusion, empathy and intuition. These social behaviors are more often associated with women than men, but they can be learned by anyone.

Do the personal and social pressures women face make it harder for them to succeed as leaders in a corporate environment? Countless factors may come into play for women including, maternal and domestic priorities, greater societal pressures, double-standard for behaviors in the office, and the burden of maintaining physical appearances.

The fact is that standards in the business world are still made and enforced by men, and this makes it difficult for women to reach the top in any corporation.

This is especially unfortunate as studies from McKinsey and Catalyst continually find that companies in the US and Europe with a high number of women executives and board members perform better organizationally and financially.

According to Catalyst research, the 25 Fortune 500 companies with the best records for promoting women to senior positions have 69 percent higher returns than the Fortune 500 median for their industry.

The results of a 2010 McKinsey Global Survey found 72 percent of executives say they “believe there is a direct connection between a company’s gender diversity and its financial success.” According to the study, companies with the highest levels of gender diversity also had higher returns on equity, operating results, and growth in market valuation than the averages in their respective sectors.

Research on collective intelligence by Christopher Chabris at MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence and Anita Williams Woolley at Carnegie Mellon University found that the one predictor that a specific group will have high collective intelligence requires that at least half the chairs around the table are occupied by women.

According to Chabris and Woolley it is this superior social sensitivity in reading non-verbal cues and other people’s emotions, and fairness in taking turns that make the difference. Superior social sensitivity includes things like emotional intelligence, a holistic perspective, empathy and intuition.

These traits or “soft skills” are often marginalized or dismissed altogether in the business world. And though they are regularly associated as more feminine characteristics, effective soft skills have proven to be a powerful predictor of career success for both men and women.

Leslie Pratch is a clinical psychologist who headed research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business investigating the longer-term personality predictors of leadership. She found that gender-based expectations for behavior very much influence the styles and evaluations of leaders.

According to Pratch’s research, women are expected to display high levels of social qualities, including the need for affiliation, a tendency to be self-sacrificing, a concern for others, spontaneity, and emotional expressiveness. Men, on the other hand, are expected to show high levels of qualities associated with acting or exerting power, independence, assertiveness, self-confidence, and instrumental competence.

When applied to leadership, female-stereotypical forms of leadership are interpersonally oriented and collaborative, whereas male-stereotypical forms of leadership are task oriented and dominating.

At a time when strong leadership is so desperately needed, it may be necessary to redefine what it means to lead.

To be a successful company and thrive in a global economy, leaders need to lessen their grip on independence and domination, and embrace the distribution of power by engaging others in a collaborative manner to encourage diverse opinions that can bring about successful solutions.

This means hiring and promoting people who have both a task- and collaborative-orientation. In the near term, they may need to promote those people who primarily demonstrate relational intelligence, empathy and intuition to complement those who already demonstrate decisiveness, goal-directedness, and performance-orientation.

And this, more than likely, means hiring and promoting more women into leadership positions.

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