Companies look for certain qualities for job promotion and a recent Wall Street Journal article (registration may be required) explains how living abroad helps clear that path. It’s presumed that those with international experience are curious, risk-taking, and adaptable people, who undoubtedly add value to any organization. Well, those are the same qualities necessary for effective communication.
When we build new business relationships, we do so by exploring new territory, which shows our curiosity about people. When we undertake projects in unfamiliar industries, we’re tapping our reservoir of wisdom, which dovetails with our ability to take calculated risks. And when we’re successful at nurturing these relationships and producing results, we’ve done that by “living” their culture, which demonstrates our adaptability.
So, learning to leverage curiosity, adaptability, and risk-taking – whether or not you travel – can make you promotable. Plus, as the WSJ article also points out, people can always enhance their credentials in other ways, such as managing a project in another a country while still based Stateside.
As many of our clients will attest, we are big fans of David Maister … and that is probably a bit of an understatement. (Alan has referenced one of his books, True Professionalism twice: here and here and we regularly recommend The Trusted Advisor to clients.) Well, as you may or may not know, David started blogging a few months ago (and podcasting!) and his blog is one of the first in my Bloglines account that I read.
I was about to post his post from today to our internal blog when I realized that many of you would also benefit from his thoughts, as well as the thoughts from his commenters.
The number one challenge of many organizations (including ours) is recruiting and retention. David’s post today focused on Screening For Character–a practice I’ve watched many clients try to emulate unsuccessfully. His post has sparked quite the discussion in his comment section and I encourage anyone interested in the topic to read through all of them.
Whether the goal is elevating employee performance, SOX compliance, strategic alignment, spurring innovation, or something else, leaders earn their keep by creating the conditions of accountability in their organization.
What conditions lead to accountability? Our research has shown time and again that most people in organizations will be accountable—that is, they will do what’s needed and expected—to the extent to which…
- Expectations are clear to employees.
- Employees perceive that those expectations are credible and reasonable.
- Employees anticipate that positive consequences will follow performance.
- Employees anticipate that negative consequences will follow poor performance.
Strategy & Leadership has just published an article that elaborates our Accountability Model, highlights from our research the factors that most frequently promote and inhibit accountability, and provides a case study of how we helped one organization assess and address its accountability problems.
You can download the complete article, “How to combat a culture of excuses and promote accountability,” here.
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Presented without commentary, aside from the title of this post…
- Money Saving Tips for the Recently Downsized. If you haven’t heard about the money-saving tips Northwest Airlines provided to a group of laid-off employees, go here… and here. I didn’t have to seek out the information; a Northwest employee was nice enough to place the second news article on my airplane seat so I could read it on my flight from Philadelphia to Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago.
- We told them they’d find out via email, so what’s the problem? And the latest…Radio Shack laid-off between four and five hundred employees via email this week. For more, go here… It seems that when Radio Shack announced two weeks ago that they would lay off employees they told employees that some may learn of their loss via email.
