MIT Sloan Management Review

Why does your organization keep picking executives who don’t perform as well as predicted? Companies continue to make easily correctable hiring process errors, say Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton, who coauthored The Five Talents That Really Matter: How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance (Hachette Go, August 2024.) For example, likability plays too big of a role in most organizations’ interview processes, Conchie and Dalton say. And executive search firms, long an important part of C-suite hiring, have a conflict of interest when it comes to assessing candidates, the authors argue. Is your organization making one or more of the seven common hiring mistakes? Read the full MIT SMR article, adapted from their book, below.

Most companies address burnout with efforts like encouraging vacations, hosting company gatherings, or making mindfulness apps available to employees. These are all valid options, and they do help people recharge, but they don’t necessarily address the underlying source of people’s exhaustion or detachment. Once people return from a vacation, for instance, the conditions that caused their detachment often simply resume. This is where understanding the sentiments in context can also provide a path for action. If feeling unappreciated is a symptom, think about how to help people feel recognized for their accomplishments. If the problem is lack of control over a flood of projects, consider how to give employees more agency and empowerment to prioritize their work. In our research, factors related to people’s careers — such as feeling that their career goals can be met and that their job makes good use of their skills and abilities — show up as top drivers related to increased feelings of accomplishment and reduced feelings of cynicism. Having time for learning and support for flexible work are top ways to remediate exhaustion. We’ve also found patterns as employees climb the org chart. For example, people experience more exhaustion as they move into management and the executive ranks, but they also may experience less cynicism because they can see more clearly how their work relates to the company strategy. Looking at the dimensions of burnout can help put the employee experience in context, which in turn can help you determine how to approach the following actions. https://mitsmr.com/41w9gOY

Sanyin Siang, a board and CEO coach, adviser, and author, offers her guidance to top managers through an advice column to help them navigate the personal and professional challenges that come with leadership roles. In the following excerpt, Siang shares her insights on managing difficult coworker relationships. Read below ?

In today's business landscape, simply deploying AI no longer guarantees an advantage. What truly distinguishes companies is their access to diverse, high-quality data that boosts their AI systems' performance. However, data privacy concerns can restrict the use of unique, relevant data for analysis. One solution to this challenge is privacy-preserving federated learning. This technique, combined with specialized encryption, allows AI models or other algorithms to be trained using data from multiple, decentralized servers owned by different organizations, all while maintaining the privacy of the data subjects. In essence, federated learning involves sending the algorithm to the data, rather than the other way around. Continue reading to gain insight into the importance of data complementarity and volume, and how to overcome obstacles to the success of federated learning >> https://mitsmr.com/4eXiNWG

Here are some things I bet you can’t say at work, no matter how much you believe them and how much they affect your own motivation, engagement, or ability to make good strategic decisions: ??? “I’m not motivated to work harder or innovate when you and your bosses get most of the credit and all the bonus money.” ??? “Employee engagement is low because key leaders aren’t trusted or respected and nothing serious gets done about that.” What can you do to change the situation at your organization? To start, people with more power must take the lead on change. Expecting people below you to stick their necks further out isn’t just unfair. It’s unrealistic. People might not like the deep rules they experience, but most don’t feel anywhere near safe or emboldened enough to start challenging them. Here are some conversational prompt techniques I recommend in my work. Leaders have told me that these approaches have led to surprisingly frank and highly valuable conversations with colleagues about issues that both sides agreed should be started, stopped, or fixed. ?? Discuss the undiscussables. ?? Fix the follies. ?? Explore the “veil fails.” Continue reading Jim Detert's article to learn more about these three techniques: https://mitsmr.com/487AfWc

The common feature across all glass cliff problems is that they are challenging for?anyone?to solve: No one person or team has the answers or a plan for solving them. While this means it’s unlikely that you are maliciously being set up to fail, the downside is that the hiring manager and others in the organization might have trouble helping you explore this cliff and deciding the right course of action. To have a chance of achieving your performance goals on time and within budget, you must take the initiative and invest time in fully exploring the cliff — usually, you will be allowed two to four weeks to evaluate the opportunity. Begin by asking the hiring manager to outline the expected performance targets, deadlines, and budget. Next, identify all of the additional parties surrounding the problem, such as executive sponsors, individual contributors and their managers, collaborating internal business units, and strategic partners. You may also consult trusted advisers within your network who can provide a customer or supplier perspective related to the problem at hand. Then schedule conversations with the hiring manager and each stakeholder group to help you carefully consider the situation relative to its past, present, and future. You must understand what happened in the past if you are to improve upon what your predecessor did. You also need to gauge whether the new performance goals are realistic and what obstacles threaten their achievement. Finally, you need to soberly assess whether success is possible given the resources and stakeholder commitments available to you in the present. There are no right or wrong answers to the questions you ask the various stakeholders. Each stakeholder will have different perspectives, and some might not be able to answer all of them. Your aim through these conversations is to uncover the patterns of responses across the stakeholders so that you can begin to detect the core issues that resulted in the glass cliff, such as problems with organizational processes, structures, or culture. https://mitsmr.com/3Litibk

Sponsored Content: Those who were quick to embrace generative AI for data and analytics are now enjoying the benefits. Take a look at this survey report to learn about their approaches, pain points, and successes. https://mitsmr.com/3SU9oqc

We extend our sincerest congratulations to Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson on their well-deserved Nobel Prize recognition! Last year, Kaushik Viswanath engaged in a conversation with them about their book, Power and Progress, in an interview. The article is now available for reading. https://mitsmr.com/47NliIn

This framework is designed to help organizations focus their resilience investments on building long-term supply chain robustness. The accompanying figure illustrates how our approach compares with existing methods for valuing resilience investments. Best-guess calculations rely on a single value obtained simply by multiplying the potential impact by the probability of the event. A company generating a profit of $10 million exposed to a 2% chance of a total loss will conclude that a disruption would cost $200,000 and would be willing to invest up to that amount to mitigate the loss. However, this approach only approximates the likelihood of a disruption and its potential loss. Its utility for assessing low-probability, high-impact events is limited. It yields an average exposure to risk for a single point in time — a useful measure for insurance companies, but not for firms looking to make effective investments in resilience. Value-at-risk methods take a more analytical approach but still give little guidance about when and how much to invest in resilience. They expand on classical supply chain models designed to maximize the return on assets or minimize total supply chain costs but, like best-guess methods, can obscure events that have a low probability yet are plausible. This may lead managers to focus on an event’s probability more than its disruptive consequences. https://mitsmr.com/4fIyRwI

Andrew Rabinovich, Upwork's VP and Head of AI & Machine Learning, recently shared his thoughts on the 'Me, Myself, and AI' podcast about AI's potential to tackle complex projects with fewer resources. However, he noted that hardware advancements are lagging, particularly in wearable tech and robotics, which could hinder AI's rapid progress. Despite this, he believes we're headed towards a future with hyper-personalized digital assistants for all. Listen to the new episode now: https://mitsmr.com/3NrgW0v