"…why do your people come to work every day? If they come to work because their organization inspires the direct motives—play, purpose, and potential—they are likely performing at their best. If the culture is dominated by indirect motives—emotional pressure, economic pressure, or inertia—their performance is likely to be much worse."

Direct motives ( they drive performance)<ul><li>Play: It occurs when you’re engaging in an activity simply because you enjoy doing it.</li><li>Purpose: you do an activity because you value the outcome of the activity</li><li>Potential: you do the work because it will eventually lead to something you believe is important.</li></ul>Indirect motives (frequently harm performance)<ul><li>Emotional pressure: emotions such as disappointment, guilt or shame compel you to perform an activity</li><li>Economic pressure: you do an activity solely to win a reward or avoid punishment.</li><li>Inertia: you do what you do because you did it yesterday.</li></ul>

Why People Perform An Activity

Regarding work, play is the freedom to experiment, contemplate, and continuously improve processes to achieve a larger objective. Purpose is the second-highest motivator. People need to identify with their company’s primary objective and see how they make a difference.  Potential or a person’s belief that their role within a company supports their career goals is also important but not as potent as play and purpose. Individuals may craft their jobs building their play and purpose into their work but for an organization to reach its potential those factors need to run throughout its culture.

Play: The Most Powerful Performance Enhancer

<ul><li>Money might be the reason we accept a new position or promotion, but after the initial action, it doesn’t motivate us to do better work. </li><li>Emotional pressure like the potential for prestigious promotions or recognition doesn’t motivate better work. Economic and emotional pressures often lead to gaming behaviors where people figure out how to get the rewards, not how to do the job better.</li><li> Inertia or just showing up every day also doesn’t motivate high performance—instead, it often produces free-riders who come just for the check.</li></ul>

Money: An Effective Activator

<ul><li>They are people who show up for the money. They increase the size of a group but don’t increase productivity.  They are created when people don’t see the value of their work, their individual contributions can’t be determined, and they don’t know the other people in the group. </li><li>Job-crafters build their own purpose and meaning into their jobs which might motivate an individual to pursue their own agenda. For an organization to thrive there needs to be a sense that we all have the same purpose and meaning embedded in the company’s culture.</li></ul>

Free-Riders And Job-Crafters

"Academic researchers have found that tactical performance goals focus people on just the appearance of competence. Adaptive goals focus people on becoming competent."

A tactical performance goal is requiring workers to achieve a metric the organization has set to measure performance. An adaptive goal is asking employees to test new strategies regardless of the outcome to discover the best way to reach company objectives. By incorporating adaptive goals workers focus on the work itself and collaborate. While working on adaptive goals, people develop a sense of purpose and community, and they see how their work is important. Adaptive goals promote citizenship, workers help others and achieve larger goals.

Tactical Performance Goals and Adaptive Goals

They acknowledge both tactical and adaptive performance and create conditions so workers can identify whether or not they are meeting performance criteria. They foster play by empowering their teams with adaptive goals, they set a clear vision to create a common purpose, and they promote individual potential with training, coaching, and by supporting career goals.

The Best Managers Clarify What Good Performance Looks Like

The stress and anxiety from economic and emotional pressure cancel out the effects of positive motivators play, purpose and potential. We focus on attaining financial and emotional goals to get our needs satisfied, and we can’t relax and settle into productive work. By paying employees a fair wage and eliminating economic incentives for meeting metrics we encourage honest work.

Economic And Emotional Pressures

<ul><li>Quid pro quo leaders: They believe in giving rewards for good behavior and punishments to control bad behavior. They produce high levels of emotional pressure, Inertia, and economic pressure.</li><li>Hands-off leaders: They use neither direct or indirect motivators. They tend to get involved only when there is a problem. They believe their teams want lots of space. But teams perform best when the leader is involved.</li><li>Enthusiasts: There isn’t a motivator an enthusiast won’t try, direct or indirect.</li><li>Firestarters: They use direct motivators and do whatever they can to eliminate the indirect motivators.</li></ul>

Four Types of leaders

<ul><li>In a community, we have common values and responsibilities because of our interdependence and common goals. For a community to be healthy, its members must feel like citizens or responsible, contributing members.</li><li>Citizenship is an adaptive performance behavior. When an employee helps out another colleague in need, or advocates for the organization when they are unmonitored, the organization does better. </li><li>An organization’s culture can either inspire citizenship and build an active, supportive community or become a collective of free-riders and job-crafters.</li></ul>

Healthy Communities

The revolutionary book that teaches you how to use the cutting edge of human psychology to build high performing workplace cultures. Too often, great cultures feel like magic. While most leaders believe culture is critical to success, few know how to build one, or sustain it over time. What if you knew the science behind the magic—a science so predictive and powerful that you could transform your organization? What if you could use cutting edge psychology to unlock people’s innate desire to innovate, experiment, and adapt? In Primed to Perform, Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor show you how to do just that. The result: higher sales, more loyal customers, and more passionate employees. Primed to Perform explains the counter-intuitive science behind great cultures, building on over a century of academic thinking. It shares the simple, highly predictive new measurement tool—the Total Motivation (ToMo) Factor—that enables you to measure the strength of your culture, and track improvements over time. It explores the authors’ original research into how Total Motivation leads to higher performance in iconic companies, from Apple to Starbucks to Southwest Airlines. Most importantly, it teaches you to build great cultures, using a systematic and sustainable approach. High performing cultures cant be left to chance. Organizations must create systems that shape and maintain them. Whether you’re a five-person team or a startup, a school, a nonprofit or a mega-institution, Primed to Perform shows you how.

Stashed ideas

Primed to Perform

"The competitive advantage is what you do with the talent once you have it."

“When people are given challenging responsibilities, autonomy to control their outputs, participation in decision making, and visible and valuable recognition, it meets virtually all of the criteria for effective rewards.”

"HR is not about HR, but about delivering real value to the business."

Nurturing a staff culture that will be most beneficial to the organization’s customers, and managing effective employee development and recognition are part of what it takes to develop thriving companiesHowever, along with these organizational competencies, HR professionals as individuals need to devote attention to their less obvious, but extremely valuable, roles. These include being a Strategic Positioner, Credible Activist, and Paradox Navigator, and are required so that HR can have the influence it needs to deliver value to the business.

The Less Obvious Roles of HR Professionals

<ul><li>Strategic positioner: position a business to win in its market</li><li>Credible activist: build relationships of trust by having a proactive point of view</li><li>Paradox navigator: manage tensions inherent in making change happen</li><li>Culture and change champion: make change happen and weave change initiatives into culture change</li><li>Human capital curator: manage the flow of talent by developing people and leaders, driving individual performance, and building technical talent.</li></ul>

The 9 HR Competencies Needed Today (1)

<ul><li>Total rewards steward: manage employee wellbeing through financial and non-financial rewards.</li><li>Technology and media integrator: use technology and social media to drive high-performing organizations.</li><li>Analytics designer and interpreter: use analytics to improve decision making.</li><li>Compliance manager: manage the processes related to compliance by following regulatory guidelines.</li></ul>

The 9 HR Competencies Needed Today (2)

Out of the nine critical HR competencies, the role of Paradox Navigator was most closely tied with business performance. Yet this is an area where many HR professionals were lacking expertise.Paradox navigators need to effectively manage tensions between:<ul><li>Global and local demands</li><li>Need for change and stability</li><li>Gathering information and making decisions</li><li>Internal and external hiring</li><li>Individual needs and collective needs</li><li>Employees vs. customers and investors</li><li>Top-down and bottom-up.</li></ul>

Become a Paradox Navigator

<ul><li>Clarify the poles</li><li>Define best outcomes – how both sides relate to success criteria</li><li>See others’ points of view – how do others experience the paradox?</li><li>Find common ground – where do we agree and disagree?</li><li>Take first steps</li></ul>Dealing with cognitive complexity is the top skill that helps to transcend paradox. Cognitive complexity involves seeing different sides of an issue, respecting other people’s points of view, learning new ideas (20-25% every 2 years), and seeing patterns in events.

How To Transcend Paradox

"High potential individuals are interested in on-the-job assignments that are challenging and valuable … because they want to create a track record of documented results."

Using employee involvement to improve staff performance takes an organizational approach to the pervasive problem of low engagement. The goal is to move from cynicism to commitment, isolation to community, and for employees to have a sense of purpose and social responsibility in their work. Initiatives like letting employees choose their next project and being more involved with staffing issues have a positive effect on employee performance.

Improving Employee Performance

One of the most interesting ways companies are involving employees is by connecting them with customers for feedback. This could mean having employees listen to customer service calls, engaging more employees in market research and social media, having customers visit the company’s office, having customers participate in employee training, and even locating employees to work out of a customer’s facility.

Connecting Employees and Customers

Measuring employee performance from an organizational perspective means focusing on organizational-wide talent data, as well as individual data. <ul><li>For example, to measure recruitment, you can look at what percentage of hires remain after two years. </li><li>To measure development, look at what percentage of promotions come from inside vs. outside the company.</li><li> To measure succession readiness, look at what percentage of employees know the company’s mission, long-term goals, and business strategy.</li></ul>

Measuring Employee Performance

#1 Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author Dave Ulrich offers HR professionals a new line of defense in the corporate “war for talent.” Destined to be a classic in the field, this game-changing book from HR visionary Dave Ulrich tackles one of the greatest challenges in Human Resources today: the talent wars. As companies grow increasingly and aggressively competitive in hiring and nurturing individual employees, this book offers a refreshing, revolutionary alternative. By creating dynamic systems that leverage talent throughout the organization, you can create a unified whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In the long run, that’s what gives your company the competitive edge it needs. Based on the research findings of the latest round of Ulrich’s legendary HR Competency Survey, this groundbreaking book is sure to spark debate, shatter myths, and inspire real change throughout the HR community. Filled with fact-based insights and field-tested strategies, it proves that your organization’s success lies, not in the talent you have, but what you do with the talent once you have it. This book shows you how to build capabilities, strengthen systems, and empower human capital—for longer lasting success.

Victory Through Organization: Why the War for Talent is Failing Your Company and What You Can Do About It

Since the start of the Great Resignation, millions of employees worldwide transitioned jobs and careers. The next great reckoning to pay attention to is creating opportunities for multifaceted career growth outside of management.
For many professionals with exceeding aspirations, the next step is becoming a manager. They are often promoted to managers because they are good at what they do, but being great at one role doesn't guarantee that they will also be great at making others better.

Creating opportunities for multifaceted career growth

Part of companies celebrating diversified perspectives and talents means admitting that some aren’t meant to become managers. Bad managers can be causing high levels of turnover.
Leaders should remember that employees choose where they want to work and what they want to do. Becoming a manager should be a choice not prompted by career progression. There are ways to create alternate career paths for those who don't want or are not a good fit for a managerial role but can still grow.

Finding alternative career paths

Try to explore what opportunities may be available and could motivate people.
<ul>
<li>What business needs require a more experienced employee?</li>
<li>Are there options for high performers to become their own manager and continue to do meaningful work?</li>
<li>Is there a way for struggling managers to "step off" into a meaningful position that better fits their strengths and interests?</li>
</ul>
Sometimes just being given a new opportunity to learn and grow can be very helpful.

Reflect on the needs of the business

People don't know what they don't know. Creating greater awareness of what's possible helps people find the next step.
<ul>
<li>Clearly describe and outline dual career paths within your organization - ones with and without management requirements.</li>
<li>Consider asking them what they would like to experience in terms of roles and responsibilities so you can present targeted opportunities to them.</li>
</ul>

Define career path profiles based on required skills

Encourage talent enhancement for employees to develop their existing skills or learn new ones that can help them get on a defined career path. Pair employees with "peer mentors" and give employees at all levels the opportunity to contribute their expertise to enhance someone else's. This can lead to an enhanced sense of connectivity within your team or overall culture.

Enable upskilling with mentors

Careers shouldn’t always be viewed as ladders to climb to higher positions argues Apps Associates Lydie Fox. Sometimes a new opportunity to learn and grow can make all the difference.

Not everyone should be promoted to manager. Here’s how leaders can guide alternate career paths

The rise of the corporate nomad will be inexorable in the wake of the pandemic. These are individuals who, while maintaining a full-time employment relationship with their organizations, will increasingly participate part-time in geographically dispersed initiatives and projects within their employer’s global network. The benefits are many. It gives individuals a sense of financial stability while also allowing them to be exposed to new people, new geographies, new cultures, new values, and new work projects without having to leave their current organization.

Corporate Nomads: Employees Working While Traveling Around The World

Fostering this type of global exposure and contribution will also become an increasingly important and effective way for organizations to retain and develop top talent. It can provide individuals and corporations alike with an extraordinary chance to reap the benefits of job enrichment and change, without requiring individuals to jump into the wrong place with the wrong fit, and without creating a situation where organizations must replace great employees who should never have been lost in the first place.

Retaining Top Talent

While freelance relationships will likely continue to be an attractive option at the beginning and toward the end of our professional lives, stable employment relationships have important financial benefits from our early 30s to 50s, when we are struggling to pay our mortgages, the family’s education, and save for retirement or future financial independence.

The Appeal of Being a Corporate Nomad

In addition to financial stability, emotional and social stability are extremely important assets for our well-being. Over the past two decades, a growing body of research has focused on the importance of positive psychological capital (PsyCap). This combination of self-efficacy, optimism, hope, and resilience is easier to develop when we are not alone. A rich network of colleagues, professional home and family, and a culture where we fit and belong become ever-more valuable assets in an increasingly challenging world.

Psychological Capital

For those raising families in their 30s to 50s, giving their children a stable environment without frequent relocations will strongly contribute to their emotional and social health and development.A stable community and network of local friends and relationships can help kids develop strong roots. In turn, your global perspective as a corporate nomad can help you expand your children’s vision, while your growing international network of virtual friends and relationships will help them open their wings for sporadic travels, exchanges, international friendship, and studying abroad.

Stable Family Time

<ul><li>As we navigate the waves of the Great Resignation, switching jobs has become increasingly risky.</li><li>72% of those who recently switched jobs have been frustrated, and almost half of these would consider trying to get their old jobs back. </li><li>Virtual interviews can limit our ability to get a good sense of a new job environment, while the Great Resignation is increasing employers’ pressure to paint unrealistically rosy pictures. </li><li>Corporate nomads can find exciting part-time challenges within their current organizations — lowering the risk of making a company move they may regret.  </li></ul>

Switching Jobs Isn't Easy

Being a corporate nomad allows you to be exposed to new people, new geographies, new cultures, new values, and new work projects that will foster your development through stretch assignments.A rich stint as a corporate nomad can be an extraordinary training ground and networking platform if in the future you decide to embark on a new free agent stage.

New Kind Of Exposure

The rise of the corporate nomad will be inexorable, given the strong and growing benefits for individuals and organizations alike.In the wake of the pandemic, and even more so in today’s delicate global geopolitical scenario, we increasingly crave meaning. Before even thinking about what new internal contributions and experiences you might want to apply for, get clear on your purpose. This <a href="https://hbr.org/2021/10/reigniting-your-purpose-in-the-wake-of-the-pandemic">Six C’s model</a> can help you think through what you’re looking for, including what to look for in a new job if your corporate nomad visa is denied by your organization.

How to Become a Corporate Nomad: Clarify Your Purpose

Once you have clarified your purpose and come up with a series of attractive generic options (in terms of experience, learning, and contribution), you should systematically source for organizational units, functions, and geographies that could benefit from your potential contribution. Equally important, you should search for (and check references on) specific individuals you may want to partner with in your nomadic experience. You should take this as seriously as an actual job search, for which <a href="https://hbr.org/2020/06/how-to-find-a-great-job-during-a-downturn">this article and its downloadable decision support tool</a> may be of help.

Systematically Search for Potential Project Partners

Once you have spotted an attractive opportunity with a significant chance for success, you should candidly and enthusiastically speak with your boss about the reasons why you would like to focus some of your time on your proposed initiative. In my experience, assuming your choice is a sensible one, most people will interpret your initiative as a very positive sign and strongly support it.

Pitch the Idea to Your Boss

Productivity in knowledge workers has a dramatic spread, as does happiness, and those at the top of both curves are masters at resisting technological invasion: They always plan their week ahead while blocking out time for important tasks; they avoid digital distractions and invasion, and they feel fully comfortable saying no when they have an alternative burning yes.

Proactively Manage Your Life

It won’t be enough to <a href="https://hbr.org/2011/10/how-to-hang-on-to-your-high-potentials">successfully implement high-potential programs</a> (already a major challenge). Organizations will need to avoid the trap of rigidly segmenting people into high and low potentials, and instead <a href="https://hbr.org/2014/06/21st-century-talent-spotting">look deeper into each person’s unique potential profile</a>, including their very personal combination of curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination. A look beyond someone’s experience, knowledge, and even current competence will allow leaders to imagine a wide range of opportunities for personal development and corporate contribution.

What Organizations Need to Do: Shift To A Growth Mindset

There’s a global talent scarcity of <a href="https://cybersecurityventures.com/jobs/">millions</a> of cybersecurity workers. Organizations can forecast how far someone can develop along with key leadership competencies, so as to effectively provide people with the right opportunities so that everyone becomes more aware of their true individual potential profile while helping them look for ways to unlock that potential.

Organizations Need to Reconsider how They Develop Their Talent

The best management consulting firms have always excelled at developing global talent.The rise of the corporate nomad could provide individuals and corporations alike with an extraordinary chance to reap the benefits of job enrichment and change, without requiring individuals to jump into the wrong place with the wrong fit, and without creating a situation where organizations must replace great employees who should never have been lost in the first place.

Orgs Need to Review Their Incentives Systems, Placing Higher Emphasis on Developing Global Talent

The rise of the corporate nomad should not only make us more successful and happier. It should fundamentally make us better human beings, genuinely and proactively embracing inclusion at a global scale… one nomadic project at a time.When we move, we don’t just learn about the place where we go. We also discover who we are and where we come from.

The Bottom Line

The Rise of the “Corporate Nomad”

Employers globally are struggling to fill the skills gap. To meet the unique workforce challenges of the next decade, most successful business leaders will focus on their current people instead of searching for the perfect talent.
Your team may not be at the point you need them to be, but with the right leadership approach, you can help your staff to get there.

The skills gap requires the right leadership approach

When employees can see what behaviours you value, it gives them an incentive for improving their performance. <ul><li>Reflect on your top-performing employees. What are the basic behaviours that earned them your favour? For example, perhaps they always come prepared, go beyond their teammates, or pay attention to detail.</li><li>Talk about these behaviours publicly and often. Instead of saying "be more like Jessica", your best employee, tell them to "review your work for errors, just like Jessica."</li></ul>

Value successful behaviours over individuals

On the first day, every employee wants to know how they fit in. If you don't establish behavioural expectations from the start, you allow new hires to develop less desirable behavioural patterns.
Instead, pair new staff up with your best employees to help them understand your behavioural expectations. They should think your top performers are the norm and see firsthand what it takes to thrive in your organisation.

Be clear about the path to success

Great teachers drive momentum by drawing attention to positive choices, giving high fives when they see improvements. This will result in students craving incremental improvements. Leaders of high-growth teams should look for little things to recognise to give employees momentum. "You wrote a great memo", or "Thanks for being on time every day when your whole family is sick". These statements help your employees see that your approval is attainable, which is a stepping stone for more success.

Make your approval accessible to everyone

Recognition and praise reinforce positive behaviours. Moreover, doing so publicly increase this effect. However, in a busy work week, recognition can be forgotten. If you don't manage to share compliments with your team or forget, take 15 minutes out of each week and consider what progress people have made that you didn't recognise publicly. Then do it at once. Send out one-sentence texts, emails, or Slack messages to acknowledge small successes.

Offer public recognition

People will depend on you to call out poor behaviour and correct negative outcomes as a leader. That's why you shouldn't wait for poor performers to improve in their own time. Instead, you will have to change the cycle.
Proactively reach out to struggling team members and let them know which behaviours are holding them back and which will make them successful.

Primed to Perform

Victory Through Organization: Why the War for Talent is Failing Your Company and What You Can Do About It

Not everyone should be promoted to manager. Here’s how leaders can guide alternate career paths

The Rise of the “Corporate Nomad”

Invest in your current talent to fill open roles

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