FEATURES
managing people
Your Workforce Is More Adaptable than You Think
Joseph B. Fuller, Judith K. Wallenstein, Manjari Raman, and Alice de Chalendar
page 070
In 2018 the Project on Managing the Future of Work at HBS teamed up with the BCG Henderson Institute to survey 6,500 business leaders and 11,000 workers about the various forces reshaping the nature of work. The responses revealed a surprising gap: While the executives were pessimistic about their employees’ ability to acquire the capabilities needed to thrive in an era of rapid change, the employees were not. The employees were actually focused on the benefits that change would bring and far more eager to learn new skills than their leaders gave them credit for.
This gap highlights a vast reserve of talent and energy firms can tap into: their own workers. How can a company do that? By creating a learning culture; engaging employees in the transition instead of shepherding them through it; developing an internal talent pipeline for the entire workforce; and collaborating with outside partners to build the right skills in the labor pools it hires from.
HBR Reprint R1903H
FEATURES
leadership
Cross-Silo Leadership
Tiziana Casciaro, Amy C. Edmondson, and Sujin Jang
page 080
Today the most promising innovation and business opportunities require collaboration among functions, offices, and organizations. To realize them, companies must break down silos and get people working together across boundaries. But that’s a challenge for many leaders. Employees naturally default to focusing on vertical relationships, and formal restructuring is costly, confusing, and slow. What, then, is the solution? Engaging in four activities that promote horizontal teamwork: (1) developing cultural brokers, or employees who excel at connecting across divides; (2) encouraging people to ask questions in an open-ended, unbiased way that genuinely explores others’ thinking; (3) getting people to actively take other points of view; and (4) broadening employees’ vision to include more-distant networks.
By supporting these activities, leaders can help employees connect with new pools of expertise and learn from and relate to people who think very differently from them. And when that happens, interface collaboration will become second nature.
HBR Reprint R1903J
FEATURES
ethics
How to Design an Ethical Organization
Nicholas Epley and Amit Kumar
page 092
From Volkswagen’s emissions fiasco to Wells Fargo’s deceptive sales practices to Uber’s privacy intrusions, corporate scandals are a recurring reality in global business. Compliance programs increasingly take a legalistic approach to ethics that focuses on individual accountability. Yet behavioral science suggests that people are ethically malleable, so creating an ethical culture means thinking about ethics not simply as a belief problem but also as a design problem. The authors suggest four ways to make being good as easy as possible: Connect ethical principles to strategies and policies, keep ethics top of mind, reward ethical behavior through a variety of incentives, and encourage ethical norms in day-to-day practices.
HBR Reprint R1903K
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