645 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business Review

Even when interview questions are relevant, the interview is a poor predictor of future performance. It demonstrates someone’s competence to answer questions, know theory, and prioritize information – all of which may or may not correlate to what they need to do on the job.

The traditional interview also makes it more likely we hire someone in our image, the “mini me” cognitive error. We can’t … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Geoff Tuff, Jeff Johnson, Steve Goldbach | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources

Delayed and ineffective commercial integration can turn a good deal into a loser, because sales growth ultimately determines whether a merger achieves its value-creation goals. To create value, mergers need top-line gains: More sales to more customers, expansion into new territories or market adjacencies, new products and services to sell to existing customers. But compared to other areas of post-merger activity, the commercial engine starts … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Erik Siegler, Jason McDannold, Natsuki Sato, Yale Kwon | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Mergers & Acquisitions

Competing on capabilities provides a way for companies to gain the benefits of both focus and diversification. Put another way, a company that focuses on its strategic capabilities can compete in a remarkable diversity of regions, products, and businesses and do it far more coherently than the typical conglomerate can. Such a company is a “capabilities predator”—able to come out of nowhere and move rapidly … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: George Stalk Jr., Lawrence Shulman, Philip Evans | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

For all the communication around strategy, we know that leaders at many companies don’t provide the necessary context for employees to understand what the words and sentences in a strategy statement actually mean. What can leaders do to help employees understand enough context to understand a strategy? In this article, the authors offer three ideas.

Content: Article | Authors: Andrew MacLennan, Constantinos C. Markides | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Communication, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

In an effort to minimize mishires, many companies have adopted extensive hiring processes … that we believe is as damaging a form of inefficiency as mishires themselves. […] And there’s no strong evidence that it’s actually even working.  The treatment has become worse than the disease.

[…]

In their review of their hiring processes, Google discovered that they could capture 86% of the value produced by … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Alexandra Ham, Atta Tarki, Tyler Cowen | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources

Too much performance feedback is of the “do good and avoid evil” variety. That may sound harmless, but overly general feedback increases feelings of defensiveness, rather than openness to behavior change, because it involves broad judgments and invites counterpunching rather than discussion.

Content: Quotation | Author: Frank V. Cespedes | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Communication, Management, Organizational Behavior

Effective reviews require a judgment about causes of a person’s performance. For example, are performance issues the consequence of deficiencies in motivation or ability? Some people may work hard, but lack certain capabilities: Can training and coaching enhance those capabilities? Others may have the abilities but lack motivation: Can different incentives or processes increase motivation? Still others may seemingly lack both motivation and relevant ability: … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Frank V. Cespedes | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management

The author analyzed project teams across 257 firms to identify why only 60% of planned value is typically realized in change initiatives, focusing on four key factors: effective initial communication (“ACE the Memo”), ensuring resource accessibility and autonomy (“Master the Means”), employing mechanisms to align actions with goals (“Amplify with Mechanisms”), and account for the needs of each implementation stage (“Measure to Account”).

Content: Article | Author: Tom Hunsaker | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Change Management, Management

Managers spend 20% of their time on average managing team conflict. Over the past three decades, the authors have studied thousands of team conflicts around the world and have identified four common patterns of team conflict.

Content: Article | Authors: Amanda J. Ferguson, Priti Pradhan Shah, Randall S. Peterson, Stephen L. Jones | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Inflation-fatigued shoppers are witnessing prices fluctuate across categories with unprecedented scale and frequency — a trend often seen as yet another cunning commercial scheme. Is the extra profit companies see from dynamic pricing worth the risk of alienating customers? If done well, companies shouldn’t be making that trade-off — dynamic pricing.

Content: Article | Authors: Marco Bertini, Oded Koenigsberg | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Pricing

In their work with more than 10,000 startup leaders across 70 countries, the authors identify three common management myths among startup leaders looking to grow their companies: the myth of scaling without hierarchy, the myth of structural harmony, and the myth of sustained heroics.

Content: Article | Authors: Josh Yellin, Martin Gonzalez | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior

Gartner research has found that managers today are accountable for 51% more responsibilities than they can effectively manage — and they’re starting to buckle under the pressure: 54% are suffering from work-induced stress and fatigue, and 44% are struggling to provide personalized support to their direct reports. Ultimately, one in five managers said they would prefer not being people managers given a choice. Further analysis … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jonah Shepp, Vitorio Bretas | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Thanks to the increasing availability of AI, including machine learning algorithms, deliberately creating customer data feedback loops is now possible for most products and services. This means that as a firm gathers more customer data, it can feed that data into machine learning algorithms to improve its product or service, thereby attracting more customers, generating even more customer data. For some products, it is easy; … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Andrei Hagiu, Julian Wright | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Customer Related

Many companies today are struggling to hire and retain talent, but more often than not the problem is self-inflicted: They’re simply not using a broad enough array of tools, sometimes because they don’t even know the tools exist. In this article, the authors list 40 tools — some familiar but underutilized, others unfamiliar and innovative — that can help companies find and keep the people … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Allison Bailey, Joseph Fuller, Manjari Raman, Nithya Vaduganathan | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources

Good one-on-one meetings between managers and their direct reports address the practical and personal needs of the employee, benefiting their performance, growth, and well-being, as well as the success of their team and the broader organization. However, since managers are typically the ones who run these meetings, the employee’s needs are often forgotten. Then it’s up to the employee to ask questions to get the … [ Read more ]

Content: Career Information | Authors: Cydnei Meredith, Liana Kreamer, Steven G. Rogelberg | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Personal Development, Work

Organizations of all sizes and across industries pledged their support to DEI initiatives in 2020, including building more diverse and equitable companies, and to using their power for good. Now, with the spotlight no longer shining quite so brightly on corporate DEI, how much progress have organizations made against their promises? To understand the state of DEI efforts since 2020, the authors looked at aggregated, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Evelyn R. Carter, Natalie Johnson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources

Three kinds of bias often creep into the performance-review process, in ways that disproportionately affect women, especially when they choose to take advantage of the flexibility offered by hybrid and remote work. These biases are experience bias, which leads reviewers to overvalue tasks that are easy to define; proximity bias, which leads them to think that people in their immediate orbit do the most important … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources, Women in Business

Organizations are reexamining how they recruit, develop, and retain talent. They have to, because the pandemic has accelerated three already existing trends among employees: the search for meaning; the desire for flexibility; and the pace of technological transformation. Employees increasingly are bringing a new set of values, needs, and desires to the workplace, and the worker-employer contract is changing as a result, fundamentally and permanently. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Katy George | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources | Company: McKinsey & Company

Companies often have a hard time determining how motivated or committed their employees are, because employees know it goes against their own interests to declare themselves unmotivated or uncommitted. The solution to this problem is for companies to put incentives in place that encourage employees to reveal how they actually feel. In this article, the author, a behavioral economist, describes an incentive plan that has … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Uri Gneezy | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

Shareholder cultivation in the age of stakeholder capitalism requires management to identify steward shareholders and then foster symbiotic relationships with them. The authors offer four sets of tools managers can use to cultivate steward shareholders. These tools are classified into four types based on two dimensions: time-to-efficacy, which refers to the time needed for the tactics to take effect, and implementation difficulty, which pertains to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Mark DesJardine, Wei Shi | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Corporate Governance