A leader with a non-traditional background must learn how to communicate with more confidence.

A holistic approach to offboarding

You don’t need a time line; you need a time cone.

And how to tackle them.

Don’t worry about strengths and weaknesses until you’ve identified opportunities and threats.

It reduces the odds of dismissing qualified female candidates simply because men come to mind first.

Too often, ads end up targeting people who would buy the product anyway.

When she’s passed over for a big promotion, one leader must learn how to reposition her out-of-the-box approach for the C-suite.

Even well-intentioned firms were biased in practice.

A top-down approach doesn’t work anymore.

Researchers ran 60 billion simulations to identify when the risk pays off.

It’s not complicated: Gender diversity is a competitive advantage — and a moral imperative.

Bringing a sense of purpose to work is good for your mental and physical health — and your career.

There's a natural push/pull in building an employer brand. On one hand, you want to get as many perspectives included as possible, but that leads to group-think and camel creation. Alternatively, you could do it on your own, but best of luck getting any buy-in when the time comes. What's an employer brander to do? Here are some ideas on how to get the group to solve problems together.

Better diversity programs can't happen until we all (speaking mostly to myself, here) get comfortable talking about diversity. How do you walk the line between being aware (and owning) one's privilege, and being one of those "more-woke-than-thou" types. The HBR, who might know a thing or two about privilege, have some thoughts on the subject of talking about diversity.

Related to that, HBR asks if you give your employees a reason to feel proud of what they do? I'd add in, do you ask employees to share that pride when talking with their own networks?

It's no secret that changing your gender ratios starts by making sure there are women in the pipeline. But how do you make that happen? It may not be enough to say the language in your job postings is "balanced." Instead, consider changing the "requirements" section to "We anticipate using skills like these to be successful" to encourage more women to apply.

Yet another case study of an organization deciding to get serious about their diversity issues and actually moving the needle. How?! Start with data, but then also (and here's the magic part) have the will to make changes based on the data. Crazy, right?

The assumption is that culture creates the brand, and I think that's true to an extent. Your brand is the intentional and judicious selection of traits and ideas that highlight your culture. But can you go the other way? That is, can you use the brand to change the culture? Great article on the chicken/egg situation and some great ideas on how you can make an impact on the culture.

I think I've mentioned that the concept of "belonging" is far more powerful than "joining" (think about that when you write your 47th "join us!" social media job post...), but the HBR goes deeper, defining the value of having people feel like they belong to the company. (Note the juxtaposition with the white paper above where isolation and loneliness are going to be a real problem).

It feels reasonable to me that in a time of virtual/remote everything, the thing that will help bring people together and build connection and increase productivity is shared learning. What we learn together is what keeps us together. That holiday zoom class where everyone learned to make gnocchi in their own kitchens was the highlight of your Q4? Keep that in mind and start supporting shared learning experiences at work as a means of developing culture.

I can't be the only one who feels the hesitation and mild panic that comes from occasional work-induced anxiety. I would expect it to be somewhat endemic within our industry (though I have no data to back that up). So if you need a primer on how to think (and breathe) your way through anxiety at work, HBR has something for you.

I've got an open call for podcast and article ideas (feel free to chime in), and one of the big asks is more discussion on how to work with recruiters and other teams. While I try and put together my own thoughts, here's an article from HBR on how culture differences should be considered when building trust with other business units.

Anyone who has ever worked with sales and marketing teams knows how embedded data is in everything they do: how to collect it, how to make decisions with it, etc. And yet, data isn't really a core part of TA/Recruiting culture. Sure, we know our pipeline and TTF numbers, but that's just simple outcomes. I'm always thrown by how hard it is to get TA teams to think with data, but that's because the industry doesn't have a culture of using it. And if no one else in TA is using it, it's a great excuse to not use it. So if you're ready to change that culture, HBR has some good ideas.

Let me ask you a question: would your overall employer brand be better/stronger if everyone felt like they had a hand in crafting their own jobs, if they were able to shape the tasks, people and purpose of the job to better match who they were? The concept of "job crafting" (new to me) has been studied for the last 20 years and the impacts are very interesting. While the article is geared towards, "you should try to craft your job," what if you started to think how you support and encourage others to craft their jobs to make them feel more satisfied and fulfilled at work? That sounds like an interested employer brand strategy to me.

Paging Captain Obvious: HBR finally has decided that job postings are a good way to attract better talent. Hey, who's snitchin?! Anyway, I just did a webinar on how to write better job postings faster, so if you want to see the recording, you'll have to ask me nicely. Just reply to this email.

I loved this article on how "combinatorics" (that term had to have been invented by an MBA with a math background) can help find tune your value proposition. If you ignore the jargon, there's a heck of pitch here: because you don't really understand what your talent prospects want (because you haven't tightened your focus enough), you can't differentiate.

We all know how COVID is changing work, but it is time to stop thinking about "work" in terms of a "job." Our jobs are going to be more fluid and driven less by tasks and much more by outcomes. Add to that disconnection from a core office, and technology that allows anyone to tap into more remote systems and we're entering a time when the very concept of a job will be re-thought.

I'll admit that I started reading this article on how data can help make remote teams work better to see what kind of data they were looking at, but it's really a different article. The premise is that if you give your staff more of the data/context/info on how leadership makes its decisions, other staff will likely make similar decisions, Further, with that info, they can do better work with less oversight, thus supporting a more remote work space. Why should I care? Because this is a great way to show a candidate what you mean by "we give people lots of opportunity" or "we empower our staff," both of which are functionally meaningless. But talking about how much data and info you share internally to support this claims makes those brand claims infantely more believable, credible and clear.