Insights

This will bring superpowers to everyone.

In his speech at a recent Mind the Tech conference, Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) had just had its "iPhone moment." Nvidia is a leading provider of the chips, platforms, and supercomputers that give AI life, so Kagan would know when this moment happened, but — what does he mean by this?

Just as the iPhone popularized mobile computing, generative AI has provided everyone with access to AI tools and algorithms that were once reserved for technical experts: the makers of ChatGPT have pioneered a supercomputer that’s easy for anyone to use. In other words, GAI has democratized AI, making this an "iPhone moment” beyond which everything is going to change. Here’s why you should care.

Seismic changes

• Superpowers for everyone
  ‍The ubiquity of GAI in forms such as ChatGPT is significant because of the technology’s applications: simply put, GAI gives people cognitive superpowers. Just as the machines of the industrial revolution gave humans physical superpowers, GAI has done the same for our brains. And our exploration of these powers is just beginning.
• Say hello to your (superpowered) AI coworker
  ‍Soon, everyone will be able to access an AI coworker with superhuman abilities. They will process oceans of data for you in real time; teach you any topic you want, in any language you want; and generate the content you wish for whenever you do. Talk to them, and they will talk back.You’ll be able to train and improve your coworker using your natural language — no coding skills required. With these AI coworkers at your side, you can be a computer programmer, a content creator, a researcher, an explorer, and more. The possibilities are mostly limited only by our imaginations, so for those who can (or can’t) escape those limitations, the impacts will be profound.

Applications

• What this will look like in the workplace
  ‍At the level of company strategy, firms may use GAI to become information producers in their specific domains. This information will be leveraged internally to improve operations or sold externally inside of products and solutions that will surprise and delight customers.At the level of roles and functions, employees will access AI coworkers to gain superhuman assistance for role-specific tasks. For example, HR teams will access AI coworkers to help with recruitment and talent management, while supply chain managers will work with AI to improve logistics and planning.

While the powers we’ll gain from AI will be remarkable, as the Spider-Man adage goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Leaders and employees alike will need new skills to use their new powers wisely, including discerning when to trust an AI's recommendation, how to judge those recommendations, and how to inform their judgements using shared ethics.

• Be a better co-worker. To get the most out of our AI coworkers, we will also need to improve our own AI fluency. This will include learning how to interact with AI systems, how to integrate them into our projects and workflows, and how to interpret, value, and improve their output.

With all this in mind, prepare to seize the moment. In 1998, roughly ten years before the iPhone, Steve Jobs said, "Innovation is about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it." He might say the same about this particular iPhone moment if he were alive today. It’s an exciting time in history for us to collectively to “get it,” making the most of the powerful, positive impacts GAI can bring to our lives.

Why do organizations struggle with prioritizing sustainability? It’s clear that the urgency to take action has increased exponentially. Whether it is directives from the board, pressure from investors, agitation from employees, or societal expectations, corporate leaders know they need to act now. Yet many companies are stuck, weighed down by inertia. Their programs and initiatives languish. So, what’s the hold up? And what can we do about it?

Too often, companies respond by setting “moon-shot like” visions and ambitions. They establish lofty Net Zero targets or even bigger societal goals – but then find it difficult to know where to start. It’s too easy to feel overwhelmed by the bold vision and all the changes that you must make to your organization’s operating models, systems, processes, and ways of working to make a sizeable shift.

Furthermore, many organizations’ sustainability strategies, and their execution, sit with a tiny team that works in a silo. This is an issue. Real change takes a village, so your organization needs to focus on engaging all its people to create the ownership necessary to drive change.

The good news is that this is possible. Throughout this series of articles on making sustainability actionable and personable, we’ll discuss ideas, initiatives, and ways of thinking adopted by leading companies across multiple sectors to provoke thinking and spark action.

Empowering your team to lead your organization’s sustainability initiatives may seem like tall marching orders – but getting the ball rolling is not as difficult as it seems. Begin with prioritizing the small changes that will make a big impact.

‍Start with mindset to move the organization

‍The first step in helping people take action is enabling them to shift their mindset. We view mindsets as beliefs or way of thinking that determines your outlook or mental attitude. Below the surface, mindsets are fueled by your underlying thoughts and feelings, which ultimately drive your behaviors, choices, and actions. Driving action and results requires a change in behavior, and behavior change starts with shifting mindsets.As your organization puts sustainability at the heart of its purpose, strategy, and culture, we have found through our work that there are three key mindset shifts your people need to make to ensure their good intentions around sustainability actually turn into action.

1. Shift from "This is too overwhelming …I've no idea where to start!" to "I'm a part of the solution."
   ‍The overwhelming complexity of sustainability can lead to the sense that no one person, team, or organization can make a difference. This causes paralysis from the boardroom to the front line.
   
   To combat this limiting mindset, you need to help your people realize that everyone can make an impact and that they are an important and necessary part of the change. This starts with connecting each person’s role to the business’s sustainability vision.
   
   To do this, invest in building “sustainability acumen.” Similar to how developing business and financial acumen helps people take ownership of how their role impacts business results, developing sustainability acumen enables employees to see their part in making shifts towards sustainability and how their behavior ultimately impacts business results.
   
   Start by defining sustainability in terms of your organization’s purpose, strategy, and focus areas. Then, use experiential learning that puts people into future state scenarios and contexts to help your people see how they can live the new strategic vision in their daily work.
   
   For example, in 2020, the CEO of a leading UK bank launched the organization’s new purpose and strategy, which was anchored in sustainability and would require a different approach to engaging with their customers, clients, society, future generations, and investors.
   
   In service of achieving this vision, the bank launched several initiatives to embed its sustainability goals across the business. One of these was to immerse 5,000 leaders in future state scenarios where they grappled with the tensions and polarities of the different ways of working required to achieve the organization’s vision. The leaders were introduced to simple tools to help them make decisions in difficult moments and had the opportunity to practice. As a result, over 4,000 actions have been taken to pursue the company’s new sustainability-focused purpose and strategy. The leaders were able to translate the organization’s overarching sustainability goals into tangible actions for themselves and their teams.
2. Shift from "I need to lead us through this change" to "I lead in uncertainty and disruption."
   ‍The past few years can be characterized by two words: uncertainty and disruption. While many leaders and organizations associate this characterization with risk, a world of constant change is the reality of the future, especially when it comes to sustainability.
   
   To embrace change as constant, leaders and organizations need to shift their mindset from the assumption that “disruption causes risk” to the understanding that “risk is a result of a lack of disruption.” If your organization isn’t constantly pivoting in anticipation of the future, it will fall behind.
   
   This is especially true when it comes to sustainability initiatives. In the world of sustainability, new information, technology, and opportunities are limitless. The longer your organization waits to begin implementing its sustainability strategy, the further it falls behind. Instead of waiting for the perfect strategy or initiative, leaders need to embrace uncertainty and take on an innovation mindset. In this context, innovation is the discipline of solving problems in new ways under conditions of uncertainty. In practice, an innovation mindset will enable leaders to test new ideas by failing fast and cheaply. Then, with new knowledge and learnings in hand, they can quickly pivot towards better innovations, initiatives, and strategies.
   
   For example, a U.S.-based energy company recently set a goal to reduce emissions by at least 50 percent by 2035. In the process sought to create new “green” customer experiences and products.
   
   To create these new experiences, the organizations’ leaders needed to adopt an innovation mindset. They embarked on a week-long innovation challenge with the goal of ideating a new portfolio of solutions to implement within the business. This challenge enabled the team to adopt the mindset that new and disruptive ideas were worth exploring, even if imperfect.
   
   Following the challenge, top solutions were selected to go through an innovation pipeline, where they would be tested to “fail fast and cheap.” Ultimately, the winning solutions would be launched into the marketplace.
3. Shift from “Cause and effect” to "Holistic” thinking.
   ‍Across the business landscape, value chains have been rigorously optimized for efficiency, which has led to a very linear “cause and effect mindset.” This approach has enabled many incredible innovations, such as Taylorism and the revolution of factory manufacturing. However, tackling the challenges that sustainability presents requires a different mindset.
   
   To make a real difference, organizations need their people to be able to grapple with competing priorities, hold multiple truths simultaneously, embrace paradoxes, and see the different relationships between the many elements in a complex system.  The challenge though is that most leaders have yet to be trained to think this way! In fact, it’s normally the opposite. To ensure that people, the planet, and profit can all benefit, organizations need to develop their people’s ability to think holistically.
   
   ‍Leaders need to believe that they can overcome “trade-off inertia” and build disruptive business models where everyone wins. When people shift their approach to solving problems from linear thinking to a holistic framework, the possibilities are limitless.
   
   For example, in 2018, a multinational mining company launched a strategy where innovation and sustainability were at its core. To achieve its deliberately ambitious goals, the company’s leaders were challenged to think more holistically in their day-to-day decision-making. The organization embarked on a program to help its leaders develop “full impact decision making.”
   
   This would enable leaders to leverage a wider systems view of what could happen when making decisions and consider second, third, and fourth-tier impacts across multiple stakeholder groups and time horizons. To develop this capability, leaders were immersed in a digital simulation experience that enabled them to practice running the business’s strategic operations over the course of 15 years. Leaders encountered sustainability-related challenges and “wicked problems” that had both short- and long-term impacts on the business. They were also challenged with balancing different stakeholder groups and key financial, environmental, and societal performance metrics that mapped to the company’s KPIs. The organization also invited external partners to the program, which included deliberately dissenting voices, enabling leaders to experience challenges from a different frame of reference. Ultimately this experience helped them gain the critical, holistic thinking approach necessary for leading sustainability for the organization’s future.

It’s no secret that an increased focus on sustainability is critical for the longevity of our people, planet, and profits. The great news is that you likely already have all the people you need with the passion, ideas, and roles to make a difference – you just need to empower them to take action. Start by having a two-way dialogue with your people. Listen to them. Encourage them to test out new ideas. Now, this isn’t a free for all where people get to do whatever they want. But with aligned focus, holistic understanding of the challenge, and disciplined experimentation, your team can simultaneously learn and drive progress, moving forward together.

As the economy tightens, fear of recession looms, interest rates increase, and unemployment reaches record lows, organizations are forced to evaluate their budgets to determine where efficiencies can be realized. In other words, many talent teams are being asked to do more with less.

While some organizations are letting people go, and others are simply scaling back their hiring efforts, the truth is that organizations are still hiring, but specifically for critical roles. It’s more important now than ever to ensure that organizations place the right people in the right roles and equip them with the tools and resources needed to deliver maximum impact. These conditions demand a more transparent and immersive approach to sourcing candidates — one that gives them a true sense of their ability to thrive within the quirky nuances of your organizational world.

When layoffs happen, it’s not just low performers who lose their jobs.

For companies that are hiring during economic downturns, this means that there can be an abundance of good talent available. However, poor performers also lose their jobs, meaning that less-desirable talent is abundant, too. How can organizations make sure they are getting the best talent available from that diverse pool? It’s not easy. Candidates (and hiring organizations) paint themselves in the best possible light, making it hard to distinguish between a qualified candidate who might be good for the role and one who doesn’t have the skills you need. Anyone that has used a dating app is familiar with this dynamic, and has likely experienced the frustration that comes when an illusion obstructs someone’s true potential.

Reading between the lines of a job description

It is tempting to think, “There’s good talent in the job market, so it should be easy to identify people who have been successful in similar roles at other organizations. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.” There are two problems with this logic, however. Firstly (as discussed), while there are plenty of good fish in the barrel, there are also a lot of not-so-good fish. Secondly, one’s success in one organization does not guarantee success in a very similar job at another organization: context matters. It’s not enough to simply describe the expectations of the role and then evaluate people against those expectations. While doing so correctly can help identify candidates with the right experiences for the job, such an approach ignores the more nuanced aspects of the job not included in the description.

Consider the following example:

A client recently partnered with BTS to help them evaluate candidates being considered for placement into the role of president for their largest business unit. There were two frontrunners being considered, both of whom were strong contenders with track records of great success. However, the key difference between the two candidates was that one sought independence from the executive leadership team, seeing them as stakeholders who should be brought in only at critical milestones for input and oversight. The other candidate sought to partner very closely with the executive leadership team, looking to them for detailed guidance on the future direction and strategy of the business unit.

Without knowing anything about the context of the situation, the reader may believe that the former candidate — the “independent” one — was better aligned with the role of president. The reality, however, was that the executive leadership team expected to play an active role in the business unit, and had wanted to be closely involved in major decisions impacting the business. Whether this was the right approach for them or not, it was the reality of the situation. Based on our assessment of both candidates, BTS painted two pictures for the executive leadership team, one of what the future would look like if each of the two candidates were selected for the role.

The decision for the executive leadership team was easy. Nowhere on the role description was the phrase “Must run all major decisions affecting the business past the executive leadership team for approval,” but this was critically important. The point is simple: The best person for a job in one context is sometimes very different from the best person for the same position in another context. Again, context matters.

Your organization’s culture, values, ways of working, systems and tools, and mission all demand something unique from your people. These organizational truths are just as deterministic of a candidate’s success in a role as the job description. With so much talent available in today’s talent pool, how can you find the few special people that will build upon the precious foundation you’ve built for your business?

Meeting time-to-productivity expectations

Let’s examine why your hiring practices might not be ready for today’s realities. If your hiring process was created during a period of unfettered growth, high demand, and mass hiring, today’s economic landscape may strain or even break that system. During periods of high growth and demand, organizations scale fearlessly: they hire extra people with the expectation that not everyone will work out. In this setting, new hires receive leniency and patience when figuring things out, and the impact of a bad hire is diluted by the near-constant onboarding of new employees.

In today’s reality, organizations are hiring fewer people, and those new hires are under tremendous pressure to be productive as soon as possible. There is less tolerance and patience from leadership for poor hiring decisions. We see this explicitly in the tech industry today, particularly within go-to-market teams.

For example, take the comments Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently made in an internal Slack message, as reported by Business Insider: “We don't have the same level of performance and productivity that we had in 2020 before the pandemic. We do not.”

Later, Benioff stated during a call that nearly all of Salesforce’s “annual contract value was being delivered by 50 percent of sales account executives.” In the face of more highly-scrutinized hiring decisions and raised expectations for time-to-productivity, talent teams must be more confident than ever that they are finding those who are already trained to succeed and thrive. This requires a new set of tools, or at least a new mindset.

So, what’s an organization to do? How do hiring systems, tools, and strategies need to shift in this new period of economic uncertainty and a world where we are asked to “do more with less”? Here are three considerations for talent teams to evaluate.

1. Firstly, seek a deeper understanding of what traits are needed from candidates for each role:

What does success look like in this new environment? What capabilities and behaviors will help your organization drive future success in an evolving world? How important are attributes like learning agility, being nimble and resourceful, etc., to success — not just today, but also in the future?

For example, in the context of today’s economic uncertainty, skills like empathetic listening, industry-specific business acumen, and articulating value in the language of a CFO are among the most critical capabilities for sales professionals. In the past, these strengths may have been de-prioritized in favor of skills such as executive presence, storytelling, and domain expertise.

2. Secondly, identify the pivotal moments in the daily life of a target role during which those capabilities and behaviors are most critical.

When is a skill like empathetic listening most critical? Is it when a sales professional conducts a discovery workshop, or when they encounter a hesitant buyer’s objections? Whatever these pivotal moments are, they provide clear context for your job candidates to respond the challenges they’ll be certain to face, and you can observe their behavior in such moments.

3. Finally, create the opportunity for observation and immersion into an environment that emulates your organization and the realities of the role.

Day-in-the-life assessments can give candidates insight into the nuances of the organization and role — letting candidates try the job on for size, so to speak. They also give the hiring organization insight into candidates’ capabilities and behaviors. Most importantly, these assessments let them see how candidates will respond to some of the more unique elements of the organization.

After all, both the candidate and the organization are making a very important decision, and it’s imperative they enter an employment relationship with eyes wide open. This is no different than what we expect from any long-term personal relationship, within which one accepts and value the entirety of another — their strengths, weaknesses, flaws, beauty, and quirks. This means that, at some point, we need to be transparent, vulnerable, and honest about what makes us unique. Why should our approach to hiring decisions be any different?

This radical transparency requires a mindset shift for many of us.

Prioritizing honesty and inviting immersion into the quirkiness of both parties is critical to ensuring candidates and hiring organizations make the best decision. In a world where we have to be more confident than ever in our hiring decisions, we can’t afford to gloss over the aspects of our organizations that make us who we are. Isn’t it better to understand the full picture of the individual on the other end of a dating app before you make a long-term commitment.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – Jessica Skon, President and CEO of BTS Group AB, was named one of Consulting Magazine’s 2022 Women Leaders in Consulting for Excellence in Leadership.

Women Leaders in Consulting recognizes leading female consultants whose work ethic, accomplishments, innovation, and professionalism have positioned them at the apex of the profession. In an industry disproportionately dominated by men, Consulting Magazine seeks to honor women who profoundly impact their firms, their clients, and inspire other women to become future leaders in the profession.

“It’s an honor to be recognized amongst so many incredible women,” said Jessica Skon. “I’m very grateful for BTS and its unique culture. I have been at the firm since I was 22, and the constant opportunities to stretch myself – innovate, co-create with clients, and envision the future of the organization – all while having fun, are a testament to our high-performing and big-hearted culture. I’m thankful for the mentorship of our founder, Henrik Ekelund, who taught me so much of what I know about leadership, how to scale teams, and grow companies.”

View Jessica’s full acceptance speech here.

Jessica was one of 43 honorees selected for 2022, who were awarded in six distinct categories: Diversity Champion, Excellence in Client Service, Excellence in Leadership, Future Leaders, Lifetime Achievement, and Mentor of the Year.

Learn more about the award and view the full list of honorees here.

Under pressure to perform, how can leaders help their teams be successful even in unfavorable conditions?

Taking a coaching and mentoring approach is one way to ensure success. In almost every coaching conversation this year, leaders have shared the pressure they feel to deliver big results despite the reality of current economic headwinds and uncertainty in the business world.In one conversation, a leader described his experience:

“Given that people are feeling anxious about the economy, our senior leaders have set impossibly ambitious goals for 2023.”

He asked,

“What am I supposed to do? Tell my team that they can hit those goals—when I don’t believe it myself?”

This leaders’ reality is not unusual. Leaders are under more pressure than ever to hit their numbers and deliver shareholder value, even when it doesn’t seem realistic. So what can you do? In the case of this leader, he was deeply passionate about mentoring and coaching people of all ages – in fact, his favorite thing to do outside of work was coaching youth basketball.

I asked him:

“As a basketball coach, I imagine your team faces situations that feel like impossible odds. What do you do in that situation? Do you shrug your shoulders and tell the team they had better face the fact that they’re about to get their butts kicked?”

At first, he laughed but thought it over and responded:

“I tell the team, ‘Don’t look at the scoreboard; don’t look at the clock. Let’s just focus on doing the next thing right. Let’s go for a small win—make a great pass, go for a steal—and build on that.’”

While it may not be a great pass or a steal, when you’re faced with what feels like impossible conditions, look for the small wins. Then, chart a path forward with steps that the team can take over the next couple of weeks to head in the right direction. As you look to inspire others to get through a year of economic uncertainty, it can be tempting to raise the bar in the hope that people will rise to the occasion. Instead, try focusing on the everyday behaviors that lead to small wins. As these wins pile up, they create confidence, momentum, and progress.

By keeping everyone’s focus on small steps in the right direction, they might surprise themselves by ending up on a summit at the end of a rocky 2023.

The recently published book “The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps Our Economies” makes some pretty damning claims about the consulting industry. The authors suggest that consulting companies actually stunt the clients they purport to serve by denying them the ability to build institutional capabilities. A direct quote reads: “The more businesses outsource, the less they know how to do, causing organizations to become hollowed out, stuck in time and unable to evolve.”  

It may come as a surprise that our first reaction was not to cringe, but to exclaim an emphatic “YES! This is what we have been saying all along!” Furthermore, we have been actively working as a firm to engage very differently with our clients to make sure they – and we – don’t go down that road to ruin.

The book also prompted us to put pen to paper to share our point of view and advice to all companies out there – whether they are our clients or not – on how to expect more and get more from their consultant partner. Below we share a recent conversation on this topic and what your organization can take away.

The good and the bad about consulting

Anne: Kathryn, you are a long-time consultant with a deep love of consulting. Why would you want to share with the world what’s wrong with something you care about so deeply?

Kathryn: When I “found” consulting, I was in awe that companies would pay you money to have so much fun helping organizations solve really difficult problems. But over time, I lost faith in the big consulting model. I saw it delivering too little value, creating too much dependency, while consulting firms keep making money doing the same things over and over again because their clients didn’t learn how to do it themselves.  

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that there is a place for consultants. Organizations and leaders need outside perspective, and we bring that from working across many companies and industries. They need someone to hold up an objective mirror to see what is no longer obvious to them. They sometimes need skills in the moment that they won’t need over the long term. Those are all situations where consultants make sense. But organizations need to be careful about what they outsource – they cannot outsource thinking, judgment or accountability for business decisions, leadership, and results.  

Anne: You mentioned “over and over again” – isn’t that part of the consulting business model? To turn one engagement into the next engagement?  

Kathryn: I love having long term relationships with clients. You learn how to complement each other’s skills and knowledge. You build a strong foundation of trust to try new approaches. You stand on the shoulders of your collective accomplishments. But I never want to solve the same business problem with a client over and over again, because that means they haven’t increased their capability and I’ve failed. If clients are not better off – more skillful, more capable, more confident – after our engagement or initiative, we haven’t earned our money. If they have to hire a consultant one to three years later to solve the same problem, was the problem solved in the first place?

Anne: I am interested in your response to this quote from the book, “The more businesses outsource, the less they know how to do, causing organizations to become hollowed out, stuck in time and unable to evolve.”  

Kathryn: Unfortunately, it’s an accurate description of how the industry has evolved. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. Companies hire consultants for all kinds of services, but here’s the key: Don’t hire someone to make the decision for you or do the job for you. Instead, benefit from external expertise and build internal capability at the same time. This is the best of both worlds, and it’s actually why I came to BTS in the first place.

The founders of BTS and I share a common origin story. BTS was founded by former management consultants who also got tired of making recommendations that never went anywhere in organizations. They started building high-fidelity simulations that their clients could use to help people more deeply understand the new strategic direction. Then, the portfolio of tools and approaches grew from there.

Changing the approach to consulting for the better

Anne: Explain more about the role and power of simulation and practice, and how they help change the consulting game for clients.

Kathryn: I’ve learned over time that you can’t tell anyone about change, but you can help them experience it so that they become owners and authors of the future. BTS’s history of leveraging simulation to make strategy and behavior concrete and practical with real tools, approaches, and expertise is different. I saw breakthrough possibilities in the way BTS created alignment and excitement about a future that felt real and tangible for their clients. It was compelling for me when I first saw it – and a large part of what I saw was missing in the larger consulting space.

The future is never as scary as we think it is when it only lives in our head. When you can simulate the future, when you can “work through it” with others, then it becomes concrete. Even when the future is uncertain, after experiencing it, it feels less scary, and people and organizations can move forward in a more productive way.  

Anne: Another fundamental element of consulting you share is  that people are at the heart of an organization’s ability to change and thrive. You have said “you have to pay more attention to the people than the things.” Tell us more about how our clients should think about this.

Kathryn: In almost all cases, strategies don’t fail because they are bad. They fail because people don’t see themselves in the strategy and in the picture of the new future for their organization. Because of the way the consulting industry has evolved, clients think there is a tradeoff between getting stuff done and engaging people. But it’s actually a false tradeoff because at the end of the day it’s people who are doing the work. The paradox is that, the more you try to exclude people from the process in service of speed, the slower you will go. As we saw in stark contrast during the pandemic, while supply chains, processes and systems were challenged and disrupted, people changed, adapted, and improvised to keep thing going. We know this can happen outside of a crisis.

Great consultants work to make sure that your people have more than just an understanding of where they’re going as an organization. They help employees discover the intrinsic motivation to actually work in a new way and make new choices by connecting behavior and strategy, values and vision to initiatives in action.  

What it feels like to work with a great consultant

Wondering how to ensure you are getting the most value from your consultant partner? And more importantly setting your organization up for success long term? Consider this checklist.

✔︎ Great consultants don’t make things more complex: they simplify, and help you connect the dots. They  go beyond understanding the analytics and economics of your business model, your market, and your strategic aspirations. They bring deep understanding of what it takes to create real change – which only happens through people.  

✔︎ Great consultants know how to effectively help your people find meaning and purpose in your organization’s new direction because ultimately that’s what will create progress.

✔︎ Great consultants should make you feel smarter and more capable after working with them. So many consultants have made people feel bad for so long that we almost accept it as a given, which is a shame.  

✔︎ Great consultants hold a mutuality mindset. They live out the perspective, “We’re in this together — you bring value and so do we.” Great consultants bring insights AND respect and rely on their client’s wisdom about their organization.  

✔︎ Great consultants get to root causes. They get to the underlying limiting mindsets because they come from a place of mutuality, curiosity, and respect.

When should you NOT hire a consultant

At the same time – heeding the learnings from our own experience, and the challenges unearthed in the book – there are instances when you shouldn’t hire consultant:  

• Don’t hire a consultant when you want to rubber-stamp a tough decision you know you need to make (layoffs, restructuring, strategy pivots). This is about leadership courage. While it might provide air cover in the short term, in the long term it will damage your leadership brand and organizational trust.
• Don’t hire a consultant to redo consulting work you did with them before. If that way didn’t actually solve the problem, don’t do it over again.  
• Don’t hire a consulting company to do something your own employees, or lower priced resources could do – like program management or research.

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Check out this podcast if you want to hear more of our conversation on this important topic.

Much of BTS’s client work focuses on inspiring people to do the best work of their lives, and a natural extension of this mission is to bring the same capabilities to leaders in education and at sustainability non-profits. BTS isn’t alone in this effort: a recent poll highlighted a growing interest in social responsibility among consumers who realize that the brands that they support ought to contribute to the greater good.

“The ongoing pandemic nudged many to re-evaluate our relationship with the communities that we are a part of. Over the past year and a half, the COVID-19 pandemic cast a light on the varying elements in our society—socio-economic inequality, healthcare, climate change, and food security, to name a few. Many a times, the only ray of hope seemed to be the inspiring stories of people going beyond their might to help their families, friends, and even strangers.” (“The culture of giving back: Investing where it matters the most”)‍

Here are three ways that BTS is committed to giving back: supporting social impact through ventures in Africa and India by partnering with organizations such as AvoVision; using the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals as a blueprint for improving our corporate sustainability footprint; and extending our leadership development expertise to educators through BTS Spark.

About BTS Spark: Five Sparks One and beyond

BTS’s educational leadership practice, Spark, recently launched the Five Sparks One initiative to provide pro bono coaching for school leaders. Clients can opt into supporting fully-funded BTS coaching for school leaders in underserved communities. For every five clients who participate, BTS can offers a free opportunity to join to one school leader — hence, “Five Sparks One.”

Participating companies get to see every dollar they invest as a reflection of their purpose, vision, and mission. According to Jason Shreve, Head of Talent Management at accounting firm Frank, Rimerman + Co., “When we choose vendors, we consider whether their people and way of working aligns with [our mission], to be recognized as a unique, high-spirited firm making creative and innovative contributions to ​our clients and our community.” Frank, Rimerman + Co. funded BTS’s first cohort of Five Sparks One coachees to align their development and corporate-responsibility efforts.

Spark’s reach spans both coasts of the US, and through Dignitas — an international non-profit focused on mobilizing investments in school leadership training — goes as far as Kenya. Here are some reflections from participating school leaders from around the world:

“I am so humbled to be part of the selected ones. I just finished my session. It was so good – thanks to the coach and Dignitas for your assistance.” - Principal, Dignitas, Kenya

“My coach was amazing! She was always ready and excited to support, brainstorm, and practice new skills and strategies during each of our sessions. Her ability to have a caring yet constructive coaching was just what I needed as we closed out the school year and started to plan for the fall.” - Assistant Principal, WA, USA

“Through coaching, reflecting, and role-playing, my coach helped me learn and grow from past challenging experiences and reframe my thinking. I have utilized the skills and strategies I learned and experienced many times since completing the program. Much gratitude for my coach and the BTS Spark Five Sparks One program!” - Principal, WA, USA

“Through coaching we have built confidence to execute in the most difficult aspects of our roles. Every educator and every leader benefits from coaching relationships.” - Superintendent, NC, USA

What’s next?

Soon-to-be-launched leadership and coaching programs for corporate clients have already enabled free coaching for more than 50 school leaders this year, and BTS hopes to involve clients in many more. Let’s make 2023 the year of giving back and sharing expertise — please consider making Five Sparks One part of your leadership and coaching programs!

Find out more at bit.ly/FiveSparksOne

• Gad Nestel is the Head of Coaching - West Coast, USA nestel@bts.com
• Sean Slade is the co-Head of Education, BTS Spark, North America seanslade@btsspark.org

Difficult for society, communities, and teams, as well as for individuals. Burnout and angst result in more frustration and ongoing resignations — people are exhausted, and many have had enough.In school settings, education leaders juggle the need to learn with the need to keep everyone safe. These leaders have witnessed the suffering of students, families, and staff while navigating muddling — and, in some cases, absent — policy directives. Amidst all this, they’ve found a way to keep classes in session, students learning, and those who are under their care out of harm’s way, but just when it seemed like things couldn’t get worse, many have been hit with a new wave of dissent from their school boards, PTAs, and community forums.Businesses haven’t been excluded from this tidal change, either. Tired employees more frequently express disillusionment with their roles and the meaning of their work. These past three years have provided many with the time to reflect on both what they do and why they do it. Some have been rejuvenated by this reflection, and others, less so; quiet quitting, or outright loud quitting, is becoming more of a norm.Leaders are trying to cope with these issues while caring for others. Understandably, many have responded to the instinct to hunker down, not make waves, and keep a low profile, but unfortunately, this strategy doesn’t solve the problem. People need their services, business, and schools to succeed, not barely function. There is a cost to working heads-down.

Where does one start?

As with many things in life, there is a positive slant to the noise. What’s becoming clear over time is that people care, whether about their families, work, or communities. If they didn’t care, more schools would be closed, and all PTA meetings would be empty. Similarly, leaders and employees wouldn’t keep coming to work everyday, fighting the good fight to improve company cultures and create environments where anyone could thrive. People are demanding more from schools and organizations, but the currency they seek goes beyond money to include greater purpose, opportunities for meaningful work, and more community interaction.

“In our organization, we’ve emphasized both purpose and belonging because they must go hand in hand. We want people to feel like everything they do matters not just to the organization, but to each other. We want people to feel a shared sense of purpose as well as fulfillment in their own purpose. We refer to it as solidarity”. - HR Executive (from Ron Carucci’s HBR article, “To Retain Employees, Give Them a Sense of Purpose and Community”)

So, what can leaders do during these difficult times?

Focus on what’s working and what can gain traction: these leverage points enable greater engagement, satisfaction, and growth. Respond by growing connections and enhancing relationships. Concentrate on the human side of leadership.

• People are tired and frustrated → Show compassion and empathy
• People are reactive and demanding → Face the issues and be curious
• People feel scared → Admit uncertainty and make it more normative
• People feel lack of meaning → Enhance the purpose and vision

Hunkering down and ignoring concerns, issues, and frustrations will cause them to grow and fester. By confronting them with compassion, leaders can provide steps to move through these times.Embrace emotions as data, and then act wisely; show more compassion and be curious with others. Leaning into the human side of leadership and magnifying the genuine care that already exists will help people find a common purpose and community.

While these times have been and will remain difficult, they provide an opportunity to regenerate organizations and teams. Growing your quotient for discomfort will give you staying power along any journey. Though things might not change immediately, creating inclusive spaces for all voices to be heard will empower the disengaged and reconnect the dissenters. As Mother Theresa posited, perhaps a lack of peace comes from people having forgotten that they belong to one another.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN and SAN FRANCISCO, CA – BTS GROUP AB (publ), a world-leading strategy implementation firm, was recently recognized as a Top 20 Leadership Training Company by Training Industry, Inc.

“It is an honor to be recognized for our leadership training capabilities,” said Lance Wilke, Head of BTS Central. “We continue to help our clients with their most pressing people and talent challenges. From scalable, frontline efforts that help leaders respond to third-generation leadership expectations, to executive and critical role development that accelerates strategy execution, our work differentiates our clients’ approaches to talent, learning, and leadership. Key focus areas this past year included coaching, recession-proofing, digital disruption, executive communications, DEI, and more. We’re grateful for our clients’ continued trust and partnership in pursuing new opportunities for leadership success.”

BTS was selected based on the following criteria:

“This year’s selections for our Top 20 Leadership Training companies list serve the learning needs of all types of leaders from front-line employees to executives,” said Jessica Schue, market research analyst at Training Industry, Inc. “As one of our most competitive and closely watched training sectors, the companies that make up this list strategically provide their learners with well-rounded offerings in leadership topics, such as agile leadership, women in leadership, conflict management and more. Along with many offerings, these organizations provide accurate and diverse metrics to help track learner engagement and reactions through assessments, ROI impact and more.”  

“The unique and emerging companies chosen for this year’s Leadership Watchlist bring specialized leadership content from around the world,” said Tom Whelan, director of corporate research at Training Industry, Inc. “These companies bring a diverse set of training topics in different modalities, such as formal and live coaching, instructor-led courses, digital content both custom and off-the-shelf, simulations, and more." 

To see the full list of winning companies, click here.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN and SAN FRANCISCO, CA – BTS GROUP AB (publ), a world-leading strategy implementation firm, was recently recognized by Training Industry, Inc. as a Top 20 Sales Training and Enablement Company.

“It is an honor to be recognized as a top 20 sales training company,” said René Groeneveld, Global Head of BTS’s Sales and Marketing Center of Expertise. “In 2022, BTS had many innovations that integrated go-to-market-strategy and activation, which included new and simplified sales methodologies, AI enabled coaching and feedback for sales reps and sales managers, and data-driven management and leadership, to name a few. We are humbled by our clients’ trust to build these new innovations and thrilled to partner with them to unleash new opportunities for success.”

BTS was selected based on the following criteria:

• Breadth and quality of program and service offerings
• Industry visibility, innovation, and impact in the sales training market
• Client and customer representation
• Business performance and growth

“This year’s selection for our Top 20 Sales Training & Enablement companies list provides quality sales offerings in a wide range of roles, topics, competencies, metrics and modalities to fit the sales training needs of any organization,” said Jessica Schue, market research analyst at Training Industry, Inc. “These companies all offer a custom tailored experience for their learners, incorporating blended learning styles and keeping up-to-date with the best offerings, research and innovations to provide their customers with the most cutting-edge selling trends and better results.”

“The companies selected for our 2023 Sales Training & Enablement Watchlist offer a unique set of tools, topics and technologies to adapt and liven the learning experience,” said Tom Whelan, director of corporate research at Training Industry, Inc. “Adding technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), microlearning, collaborative tools and more helps these organizations adapt to both their clients' and learners' needs."

Given widespread economic uncertainty, why spend this time together instead of pursuing potential clients?

The time spent enabled leaders to gain inspiration, clarity, and confidence. They reflected on 2022’s client challenges and were humbled by their colleagues’ remarkable depth, expertise, and creativity. As a result of the event, leaders were refreshed. They returned to their markets with new ideas and insights that would enable them to make smarter, better sales.What made this conference so successful? It was the “un-conference” conference. Energizing and collaborative rather than dull and death by powerpoint, this “un-conference” utilized three critical factors that made it a success. These key tips are universally applicable and will make all the difference for your own organization-wide gatherings.

1. Executive sponsorship that is constructive – not destructive.Jessica Skon, Global CEO of BTS, served as executive sponsor for the conference and was personally invested in its success. She recognized the opportunity for the gathering to ignite the organizations’ leaders, inspire new ways to partner with clients, and uncover opportunities for growth and better serving clients.Typically, executive sponsors serve on a steering committee, occasionally reviewing the event’s content and flow. Too often, executive sponsors are guilty of co-opting those meetings, requesting major last-minute changes that cause rework and stress.Jessica, however, consistently clarified priorities and surfaced gaps in alignment she’d noticed over the past two quarters. Through daily interaction, Jessica, her senior team, and the conference designers refined their goals for the gathering, ensured the flow of the programming, and defined outcomes that would justify the time investment.Also, in the weeks leading up to the meeting, Jessica held office hours during which facilitators could practice and get feedback. These mini working sessions drove dialogue about the firm’s future and strengthened consultants’ ownership of organization’s strategy.
2. Intentional program design. Conferences are often a grab-bag of non sequitur presentations. To shift your conference to an “un-conference,” draw a red thread through all presentations by writing an explicit narrative.Jessica and the conference designers involved scores of their colleagues thoughout the content development process to co-create client stories, simulations, frameworks, lessons learned, and quick updates that would make sense to all attendees as a complete program.3. Embed opportunities for learning.Authorship is ownership. Strategy execution runs on conversation, not lengthy presentations by a sage on stage. Provide opportunities for people to share findings from their most challenging client work. Then, after each learning moment, build in opportunities for people to share thoughts, collaborate, and ideate together.Discussion is the key that will enable your team to process new information, internalize the learning, and come up with new approaches. You’ll be surprised and amazed by what your team is able to create. By providing ample opportunities for people to share challenges and discuss new approaches, you will create optimal conditions for learning, alignment, and growth.

By following these “un-conference” rules, BTS was able to create an experience that accelerated sales in 2023. Rather than starting from behind after taking a week to sit through a series of unhelpful PowerPoints, consultants left the experience ready to help clients solve problems in new ways – to help them create their own great “un-conference” memories.By leveraging your executive sponsor effectively, taking an intentional approach to program design, and building in opportunities for learning at every step, you too can hold a gathering that builds community and strengthens your company culture.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN and SAN FRANCISCO, CA – BTS Group AB, a world-leading strategy implementation firm based out of Stockholm, Sweden, has joined the Cincinnati Innovation District as a corporate partner.

The company will locate its global innovation, digital transformation and ESG center within the University of Cincinnati 1819 Innovation Hub, the nerve center of the CID. Using this as a base, BTS plans to host clients for field immersions, coordinate learning programs for 1819 partners, and engage in interdisciplinary projects with faculty and students to advance the transformation efforts of their clients.“

At BTS, we believe that strategy and culture can be mutually reinforcing. Our partnership with the Cincinnati Innovation District furthers our capabilities to provide our clients with powerful leadership experiences to imagine the future of their business,” says Bhavik Modi, a director at BTS who will lead the partnership. “We look forward to showcasing the Cincinnati story globally and bringing our ‘big hearted and high performing’ culture to the community.”

BTS joins several Fortune 100 and 500 companies, including Kroger, Fifth Third Bank and Procter & Gamble, as corporate partners in the Cincinnati Innovation District.

“The Cincinnati Innovation District offers a wealth of new opportunities for BTS,” says Peter Mulford, Chief Innovation Officer at BTS. “This partnership not only expands our capacity to solve problems in new ways, it also gives our clients the opportunity to see innovation first hand, exploring the latest technology in an environment designed to spark new ideas and inspire transformation.”

The first innovation district in the state, the CID was announced in 2020 by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine as a partnership among the state of Ohio, JobsOhio, UC and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Powered by the University of Cincinnati, the CID is designed to accelerate the development of STEM talent, research, and jobs in the Greater Cincinnati area.“

As the nerve center of the CID, the 1819 Innovation Hub is a place where students, researchers and businesspeople collaborate on inspired solutions,” says Ryan Hays, UC Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer. “We are excited to have a progressive company like BTS contributing to the innovative culture we are creating here.”

Today, as the economy shifts away from mature and traditional companies which can gain from the latter, the pressure increases for growth. Delivering on sustainable growth remains elusive and challenging across the economy.What does this mean for leaders? The phrase “grow or die” has never been truer. Every company must find their path to drive a growth strategy and execute on it. Even in a growth economy, where a rising tide can help most companies, the challenge is to grow faster than competitors and generate enough revenue beyond returns and dividends, to fuel further growth. How do you drive sustainable growth quarter after quarter? And, when you fall behind, how do you re-establish your company on a sustainable growth curve?

Through our groundbreaking research on leaders in high and low growth companies, we have been able to determine, with a high degree of statistical validity, that there are behaviors that differentiate high growth leaders – and they are not the typical “hard driving, take-no-prisoners” behaviors that many associate with growth.‍

To learn more about the game-changing growth formula, the research we conducted, and its implications for leaders of all companies, download our paper "Leadership secrets of high growth companies: what really matters."

There’s good news, though. A downturn can be a time for marketers to shine, to improve cross-functional collaboration, and to build or strengthen their status as an advisor to the business. The key is to avoid some common mistakes and, even better, seize often-overlooked opportunities.  

Do not panic or over-flex

Organizations frequently react to downturns by adding— rushing to pile on new strategies, initiatives, tasks. Teams end up overloaded with the new and lose sight of what was already working or not working. Resist the impulse to over-flex, and instead, calmly consider how to best use your resources:

• With your team, explore how you can be 20 percent better, rather than trying to be 80 percent different and better.  
• Let go of anything that isn’t effective and recommit to campaigns and initiatives that get results. Set a manageable pace and streamline the workflow. Avoid throwing too much at your team, which only leads to confusion, frustration, and misalignment when you can afford it least.
• Deepen your understanding of the customer. Recessions hit every customer and every company differently. Customers might suddenly behave differently (e.g., from innovation interest to cost focus). Recognizing how each client is affected builds trust over the long term. Also, remember that many industries thrive during a downturn (think tech or pharmaceuticals and healthcare in 2020). Identify clients that are still doing well and intensify your marketing efforts to them.  
• Increase alignment with other business units and the C-suite. Collaborate to link marketing’s efforts with the those of sales, enablement, product development, etc., coordinating with their business cycles and using data points to drive decisions and messaging.    

Get back to the fundamentals

• Continue branding efforts.  
• Reinforce your brand identity. Begin by reengaging employees in company culture, mindset, and brand, an identity they know and are proud to represent. In a downturn, organizations sometimes soften their messaging. That’s a mistake. This is a time to energize your organization around reinforcing your brand identity to customers and potential customers. It’s time to get louder.
• Shift your messaging but protect your authenticity. Marketers must revisit their messaging and make changes that resonate with their target customer, whose own circumstances have changed. The danger: overreacting and being inauthentic to their brand, latching on to the latest buzzwords or mimicking what other companies are doing. The creates confusion and lowers customer engagement. Be authentic and build your customers’ confidence in your brand as something they can trust, even in times of uncertainty.
• Watch your language. When a downturn forces budget cuts, every cost comes under greater scrutiny. Improve the language you use to demonstrate how your product or service is not an expense, but an investment, an investment your customers can’t afford to not make. Draw attention to the value they’re getting, not the transaction.  
• Embrace sustainability as a brand advantage. In a recent survey, 91 percent of US CEOs said they were convinced a recession was on its way; 59 percent of those executives said they were preparing for a downturn by pausing or reconsidering environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives [i].  Research reveals this short-sighted tactic will likely backfire:“A review of company performance during the last recession also suggests that investments in sustainability can pay off during difficult times: between 2006 and 2010, the top 100 sustainable global companies experienced significantly higher mean sales growth, return on assets, profit before taxation, and cash flows from operations compared to control companies” [ii].

In a recession, marketers need to promote the importance of a strong sustainability strategy internally—and confidently tout that strategy externally.  

• Revisit customer segmentation and the customer buying cycle.
• Identify those customers for whom what your organization provides is critical even in a downturn, or especially in a downturn. Increase your marketing efforts to those segments.
• Reexamine your customer’s buying cycle to understand what changes are happening during a downturn. This will allow you to make sure your marketing aligns with sales, enablement, and customer service—in sync with the buying process and focused on achieving results for the customer.
• Revamp your multi-channel and omni-channel marketing strategy. Even in the best of times, multi-channel marketing isn’t about playing in every channel. It’s about aligning to customers’ preferences. This becomes even more crucial in a sluggish economy. Prioritize the channels that either continue to bring in potential customers despite the downturn or that are best suited to reach those customer segments you’ve decided to direct your efforts toward during the downturn.

Focus on the long term

In a downturn, organizations understandably default to survival mode, anxious that today’s slowdown could be tomorrow’s crisis. However, research from the Great Recession confirms that companies thrive during a downturn when they don’t over-rotate on short-term tactics.

“There is also evidence of the benefits to maintaining a focus on the long term, even during a period of crisis: companies with a long-term orientation achieved higher annual growth and total shareholder return (TSR) than their counterparts during the previous recession” [iii].

For marketing leaders, this is the time to keep your eyes—and strategy—focused on the future. Use the downturn as a trigger to implement long-term initiatives and changes that will result in more data-driven, evidence-based, and efficient marketing.

While thriving during a recession is never easy, it doesn’t have to be complicated. By simply avoiding the temptation to over-flex and fixate on the short term and going back to the fundamentals, marketing can make a downturn their time to shine.  

Sources

[i] KPMG 2022 U.S. CEO Outlook. Aug. 19, 2022. https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/insights/2022/08/kpmg-2022-ceo-outlook.html[ii], [iii] “Five Ways a Sustainability Strategy Provides Clarity During a Crisis,” by Thomas Singer. Harvard.edu, July 6, 2020.

Organizational culture has the power to be an incredible strategy accelerant – but when your culture isn’t inclusive, your organization won’t reach its potential because everyone isn’t committed to doing their best work. So, how do you create an inclusive organizational culture that will ignite your strategy?

To start, leaders need to understand how culture influences the well-being of their people. They need to be willing to hold up a mirror and welcome the opportunity to see the gap between their organization’s current culture and the aspirational culture they wish they had.

What does it take to understand your organization’s culture in its full complexity? How can you invite the truth about your culture so that you can address what is really getting in your way?

When addressing cultural challenges, most organizations turn to surveys as a “check the box” activity to collect data and evaluate their current state. Leaders often assume that people will feel safe being open and honest in their responses. Anonymous surveys are a well-intended approach that prompt employees to share their genuine experiences. Unfortunately, the results do not always tell the whole story.

Why surveys are missing the mark

1. Psychological safety is requisite for any evaluation. You will not get an     accurate understanding of the state of your culture if employees believe that a survey isn’t confidential, or that there will be retribution for negatively-interpreted responses. Most employees are unlikely to report their true feelings if they fear there will be consequences for what they have shared.
2. Surveys are subject to social desirability bias, which is the tendency for employees to overreport good behaviors and underreport less desirable ones. When employees face the potential for retribution or retaliation for unpopular responses, they are more likely to paint a positive picture of your organization that doesn’t get to the heart of what’s going on in your culture.
3. “What have you done for us lately” is often the sentiment of survey     participants – if employees believe that their feedback isn’t taken seriously by the organization, they won’t participate honestly.Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• Have you communicated with participants since the last survey?
• Have issues raised been acknowledged, addressed, or resolved?
• What (if anything) has been done to mitigate reported problems?
• Did you formally thank employees for taking the time to contribute to     improving the culture?

The bottom line is that employees need to see and believethat surveys are confidential and used to drive the change they care about, orthey will not bother reporting honestly and thoroughly.

Despite these drawbacks, many organizations will continue to utilize surveys to evaluate their culture. If this is the case for your organization, be sure to put guardrails in place so that privacy is protected and employees feel safe to provide insights. Share openly about how evaluations will be used, and who will have access to the results. Build the psychological safety necessary for employees to be honest, and your audit will be a success.Even with these guardrails in place, surveys are still an incomplete solution for better understanding your organizational culture. So, what else can you do to understand and transform your organizational culture?Don’t just evaluate your company culture: observe it.

How to observe your culture

1. Gather unbiased perspectives from new employees.New employees aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid yet! They’ll come to the table without knowledge of the company’s history, cultural dynamics, and ways of working. They are great allies in the observation process, and may even share past experiences and ideas from other organizational cultures that will speed up necessary evolution.Ask new hires to spend their first month observing the culture. Do this without asking prompting questions (Do people work late? What is the feedback culture like?), or providing context. Give them license to explore without clouding their judgment with your own biases. This approach becomes a win-win – they add value immediately, and you reap the benefits.
   
   Gather feedback from people across functions, experience levels, and backgrounds. You want to be sure to get the most complete picture of the organization, so diversity of observers is key. The insights should reveal the day-to-day pain points and opportunities for cultural adjustments.
2. Check your values.Company values also influence organizational culture. These values are typically established and (sometimes) modeled by senior leaders, which can be limiting. Authorship is ownership, so your values should reflect the culture you want and need to create, and guide your organization into a promising future.When entire swaths of the company are excluded from charting the organization’s guiding principles, it should come as no surprise that some values don’t resonate. Values make a difference when they are well defined, inclusive, and exemplified by how people engage with one another.

3. Review your policies. Perhaps you’re seeking to have a more customer-centric organizational culture, and all customer-facing decisions must have a sign-off from a leader at the partner level. With this policy in place, junior employees cannot act without a partner’s consent.Those engaging most frequently with the customer are unable to innovate or experiment with solutions that might provide the best service. As you observe your culture, ensure your policies aren’t holding your organization back from achieving its strategic goals.
   
   Taking an objective perspective can be challenging, so it can be helpful to call on someone outside the company to aid in your observation. They may be able to spot issues that you have been unintentionally (or intentionally) avoiding that need to be addressed.

Throughout the process of understanding your culture, be sure you are conscious about inclusion. This will mold your new culture to truly reflect both the organization and the mindsets, behaviors, and ways of working employees need to move forward together.

After gaining a clear understanding of your organizational culture, make sure there is a plan to address any issues that were uncovered, especially if the culture has some toxic elements. While the CEO, Chairman of the Board, and Board of Directors need to take responsibility for initiating the change, all employees should be held responsible for repairing the culture.

Creating this culture of inclusion means gaining more buy-in from all employees – from the most senior levels to the frontlines, across regions and functions – which is the powerful strategy accelerant you’ve been seeking. You are sending a message to everyone in the organization that you need them and that they are vital to the organization’s success.

A culture of inclusion fortifies your organization with the collective commitment needed to navigate future shifts with greater ease and success. Imagine working for an organization where everyone invests in creating and sustaining a great culture – who wouldn’t want to be a part of workplace like that.

The great Wealth Transfer and several other shifts in the ultra-high and high net-worth client bases are just beginning to emerge. Amid these massive changes, many financial services firms are wondering what’s next for their organization and industry. The reality is that organizations must transform and perform or prepare to be left behind.So how can financial services organizations shift to this new way of working? It starts with your customer-facing employees. Your relationship managers are the critical force that will enable your organization to adjust to rapidly changing customer needs, provide next-level service, and spark digital transformation.So how do you transform your salesforce? Successfully navigating these uncharted waters requires four critical elements:

1. Strategic intent and alignment

It is critical to define your transformation as part of the strategy or align it to the strategy. This ensures that there is a clear line of sight around what each customer-facing employee is doing and how it contributes towards the business’ overall goals.To do so, inspire your people by defining the following:

• Alignment – understanding of the desired future state of the organization, why things must change, and how it will happen.
• Mindset – the belief that the shift is necessary, worthwhile, and beneficial for employees and the organization.
• Capabilities – the skills employees need to change the way they are working and move into the new way of working.

Alignment, mindset, and capabilities are essential for helping employees buy in to the transformation, internalize the shift, and bring it to life.

2. Business sponsored transformation

Every transformation should be sponsored by a business unit lead or a business unit executive. This ensures that the transformation is taken seriously by all stakeholders and can be kept top of mind as the business moves forward.Here’s how you can gain the critical buy-in necessary from the following groups:

• Executive team – responsible for delivering results within the organization. To gain buy-in, consider partnering with an executive sponsor to walk the executive team through the transformation.
• Human capital team – traditionally sponsors elements of the transformation. They focus on the quality of the journey, alignment to existing processes, and alignment to job profiles. To get buy-in from this group, consider including them as part of the scoping process or on the steering committee.
• Leadership team – the one group that must buy in to the transformation. These leaders need to feel that they are contributing to shaping the transformation and feel supported in navigating this journey. To do this, focus on two key elements: inclusion and support. Engage this group from the beginning of the journey and consider consulting them to determine the key performance indicators.
• Your people – the intended audience of the transformation and the largest internal group. If there is no-buy in at this level the transformation will fail. The key question to be answered for this group is simply “What is in it for me?” Leverage communication to gain buy-in from this group. Try drafting a structured internal communication plan that includes key-executives and sponsors as communicators.

Gaining buy-in is a fundamental part of your journey. Maintaining buy-in throughout the transformation is one of the toughest challenges that an organisation will face. Constant check-ins with each stakeholder group will ensure that you not only gain traction, but maintain it as the audience progresses through the journey.

3. Results measurement

To create impact, it is critical to align on which results should be measured as part of the transformation. The audience that will undergo the transformation must have an influence on these results, which creates a sense of ownership.Start by defining the metrics that matter most to executing your strategy. For example:

• Workshop elements (NPS, Facilitator score etc.)
• Impact on confidence
• Behaviour shift
• Business results
• Global awards

As you are designing your program, keep these in mind as they will help you measure and deliver ROI. Regardless of which metrics you choose, kick off the program with an assessment. This will provide you and the employees with a baseline understanding of their current state and enable you to compare their behavior at the start of the journey to the end.Throughout the program, build in opportunities for participants to track progress. One way to do this is by leveraging your CRM to set and measure progress on goals. This will not only provide your organization with deep data and insights on individual and organizational progress, but will also reinforce CRM use.After your program, conduct another assessment so that you can compare participants’ baseline against their current state to evaluate their progress.

4. Leader alignment

Transforming a salesforce requires that sales leaders and managers play a role in coaching and aligning the audience. This level of support creates an environment for the audience to excel as they navigate the transformation.Support from leadership is critical for the execution and application of new skills, behaviours, tools and processes. To ensure your customer-facing employees have the support needed to execute the transformation, set up opportunities for leaders to gain coaching skills.For example, integrate coaching into the program by setting coaching guidelines for each module of the learning journey. This will ensure that leaders are equipped to help their people embed the new tools and processes.

The world of relationship management in financial services is primed for disruption. Transform your sales organization before it’s too late by starting with your most critical driving force – your customer-facing employees. With strategic intent and alignment, sponsorship from the larger business, results measurement, and support from leaders, you’ll spark lasting change that will enable your organization to get and stay ahead.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN and SAN FRANCISCO, CA – BTS Group AB, a leading global strategy implementation firm, was recently named a Top 20 Assessment and Evaluation Company by Training Industry.

With decades of experience in the industrial/organizational psychology space, BTS’s assessment team continues to leverage customized business simulations to create the best experiences possible, with offerings spanning individual and group assessments, executive coaching, action planning, enhanced 360-degree feedback, and more.

BTS assessments are digitally-enabled, highly contextual experiences grounded in scientific research, providing psychological and psychometric rigor in delivery, process, and evaluation. Assessments can be administered onsite or remotely, ensuring effective measurement from anywhere in the world.

Innovations in BTS assessments this year include gamified business and leadership simulations with capability scoring; an AI-enabled, patent-pending methodology for measuring mindsets; and a culture diagnostic.

Selection to the 2022 Training Industry Top Assessment and Evaluation Companies List was based on the following criteria:

• Breadth and quality of assessment capabilities and evaluation techniques.
• Industry visibility, innovation, and impact in assessment and evaluation market.
• Client and user representation.
• Business performance and growth.

“The companies on this year’s Top 20 Assessment and Evaluation Companies List deliver high-quality tools and techniques to not only evaluate and improve employee performance, but also create actionable insights for the business and employees,” said Jessica Schue, market research analyst at Training Industry, Inc. “Covering a wide range of assessment types, such as employee development, performance, knowledge retention, leadership potential and more through extensive research and proven insights, these organizations lead the assessment and evaluation market.”

“It’s an honor to be named one of Training Industry’s Top 20 Assessment and Evaluation Companies again,” said David Bernal, Global Head of BTS Assessments. “We’re grateful for the recognition and excited to continue creating powerful, impactful experiences that produce positive outcomes for our clients, whether it’s focused on hiring, succession and development, or improving diversity, equity, and inclusion.” 

This article was originally published in Fast Company.

‍When we began the year, top of mind for managers was keeping their best people and handling the burnt-out quiet quitters. Today, as inflation rages and hiring plans are shelved, it is tempting to believe that the talent crisis has passed. Maybe managers don’t have to worry so much about the disconnect and isolation. Perhaps employees will be more inclined to stay put in uncertain times.

Though the Great Resignation is probably over, it would be a mistake to think the challenge has passed. You need all hands on deck to focus on priorities during a recession. That means you must reignite the fire for quiet quitters. It’s important to stay focused on people during a recession because there is still a potential to become stretched and depleted. How can you re-inspire hearts and minds and still give people a sense of balance and flexibility?

Since the pandemic, many good changes have come to the workplace, not the least of them greater attention to the people side of business. The secret during a downturn is to remember that driving an agenda doesn’t mean losing that connection with your people.

Most of us think of ourselves as people leaders, but what we intend and how others see us is often different. What we’ve learned about leaders in challenging times has been assessed through data analysis. We know leaders who help others feel purposeful and resilient have qualities that are hard to come by and, therefore, highly valued.

Stay calm, carry on

We have been assessing leaders around the globe for 10 years, and we know that when leaders are calm in a crisis, people are more likely to share their concerns and get issues resolved. The qualities of composure and restraint are essential to building trust. Composure is the ability to manage through a difficult period with calm and resolve. Restraint is managing your emotions and creating a safe space for conversation. These are two critical aspects of constructing a psychologically safe environment where people love working and are free to speak up and be themselves.

People rally around leaders who approach situations calmly and objectively. Their teams know it’s okay to speak up, admit mistakes, and raise issues. If you struggle to remain calm, it can be helpful to delay a response, walk away, and give yourself time to think. If you set the intention to create a calmer place where people can thrive, employees will notice the change. During volatile times, remember to control your emotions.

Share more about yourself

Many of us are inclined to focus on others at the expense of sharing our authentic selves, but connection is a two-way conversation. When people don’t know us, they don’t trust us. This is what is meant by authenticity. In challenging times, such as a recession, you might be tempted to hold back and not share your concerns. The impact might be that people don’t feel they can trust you because they aren’t hearing the truth.

Leaders can demonstrate authenticity by sharing what is happening at the right time while also reassuring others that there is a plan. When you can be real with people, you are more likely to hear thanks. They want to be treated as peers in the workplace.

Storytelling can also be helpful during difficult times. Stories connect you with others and help them see you as human. People crave that kind of connection and appreciate learning from others. Showing authenticity in the workplace can increase engagement by 140%.

Balance humility and confidence

Great leaders balance confidence and humility, flexing both in challenging times. Humility is understanding you don’t have all the answers. People typically notice when a leader expresses genuine curiosity about their experiences and points of view. Asking questions and listening closely enables you to learn more, act more quickly, and address issues promptly.

Confidence is the ability to guide a team to make better decisions, especially when the choices during difficult times are less than ideal. It isn’t hubris or superior knowledge but rather a thoughtful, step-by-step approach to clarifying priorities, considering the data, and taking action.

Difficult times can incapacitate teams when they aren’t sure what to do. The plan forward must be altered, and too much is unknown. Great leaders help their teams consider the options and scenarios and remain flexible as conditions change.

Be receptive to feedback

To develop these qualities and evolve your leadership style, ask for feedback from people who see you in action every day to understand your shortcomings. We all have good intentions, but often our intentions don’t translate to inform how others see us. After meetings, try asking, “How am I doing?”

Hearing people out is the next step: Consider what the feedback they’ve shared might be true, however painful. After you consider the feedback, simple shifts can make a big difference in how people experience you.

As we round the corner to 2023, remember you’ve learned a lot in leading through challenging times. Although a downturn might test that learning, draw on the lessons and stay open to feedback. We can only control how we respond as leaders, and when we respond in ways we want to be led, we help create people-centric companies.

When leaders achieve “great," they do the best work of their careers. They are also better equipped to role model and expect “great” from others – both of which increase value for their company and their colleagues.

Enterprise Simulation Methodology

A leading technology company found themselves at a critical juncture. They had made it to $2B in revenue through a very successful innovation with coupled services, and realized that they had years of growth ahead by running “business as usual.” However, at some point, perhaps five-to-seven years into the future, if they didn’t diversify and provide their customers with a broader suite of technology and services, they would reach market saturation and growth would stall.A new CEO was appointed, acquisitions were made, and the company crafted a broader vision. Products now had to evolve from point solutions to suites of offerings, go-to-market strategies had to evolve, and sales conversations with customers needed to change.During the path to $2B, the senior leaders and members of the executive team operated very successfully in siloed businesses and functions, pushing decision-making low into the organization. Clear metrics for success and healthy competition between silos propelled the company forward. Moving forward, in order to broaden customers’ understanding of the company (from a technology partner to a trusted advisor) and grow from $2B to $6B, a lot needed to change.For the CEO and Head of Talent, the immediate challenge became, “What is the most efficient way to equip the executive team and the top 500 leaders to pivot the company and lead the next phase of growth?” They considered all-company memos, global roadshows with the executive team, offsite working sessions with the C-suite, new metrics and accountability. Ultimately, they did all, but even still, they needed to ignite understanding and passion among senior leaders to bring the energy critical to lead the change, resist the temptation of fear, and build the cross-company relationships key to success.Creating a two-day simulation experience, the C-suite engaged all 500 leaders, enabled them to assume the role of the CEO, and allowed them to practice running the entire company for three years into the future. Inundated with customer, technology, and competitive trends, the leaders felt shareholder value creation pressures as well as employee engagement and culture realities. As the teams wrestled with the tensions and tradeoffs in evolving the company and running the core and new businesses at the same time, the leaders matured—they matured in their understanding of why the company had to change and what it meant for them.And by strengthening their command of both business models, they were better positioned to lead teams with authenticity, passion and empathy, while finding the right speed and timing of their team’s evolution to best support the company’s goals.

The Impact?

Six months later, the question on the all-company employee survey, “I understand and believe in the company’s vision and my role in making it happen,” moved from the lowest scoring metric to one of the highest. At the time, the COO said, “When I was told a simulation would be the key alignment vehicle for our top 500 leaders I was skeptical. The custom business simulation accurately modeled our business challenges and anticipated our future evolution. The experience allowed our top 500 leaders to not just see the new strategy, but to practice making our strategy and vision a reality. The experience got leaders from different organizations with disparate points of view to work together and understand the real trade-offs and friction points, and provided the ‘big picture’ view we needed.” The company later achieved its growth target with the mix of “old” and “new” revenue it was looking to balance.

Sources

[1] Schultz, Howard, Onward: How Starbucks Fought For Its Life Without Losing Its Soul, New York: Rodale Books, 2011.[2] Pierre Gurdjian, Thomas Halbeisen, and Kevin Lane, “Why Leadership-Development Programs Fail”, McKinsey & Company, January 2014.[3] Gladwell, Malcolm, Outliers: The Story of Success, New York: Little Brown and Company Hachette Book Group, 2008.[4] Kedges, Kristi, “If You Think Leadership Development is a Waste of Time, You May Be Right”, Forbes, 23 September 2014.

Define "great": Case in point

Generic leadership competency models vs. defining great leadership at your company

The president of an Asian business unit at a leading Oil and Gas company defined what leadership capabilities would be required for their top 100 leaders to meet the business objectives laid out by their five-to-ten year strategy.The company has operated in the country for more than a century, but the leases for many of the large producing fields were expiring in the next decade. Meanwhile, the national oil company was eager to assume the leases and take over production. However, operating in the country had distinct challenges: the government has no tolerance for harmful incidents, and demanded that 80% of employees and management be native to the country.It’s tempting to see these challenges requiring effective “communication” and “stakeholder management” skills. But this competency-based approach hardly gets close to the complexity and nuances of what was actually demanded from these Oil and Gas leaders in this market. The successful renewal of the leases requires:

• Anticipating and responding to changes in power in the local or federal government
• Building relationships with government officials, parliament members, and local and existing community leaders in power, both today and in the future
• Adapting to changes in regulations and policies

Yes, there are core skills required, like communicating your value proposition to stakeholders and engaging with stakeholders to find win-win solutions. However, these would never sufficiently position the company’s leaders for success. The leadership capabilities needed for success are significantly more complicated and contextual to the challenge and the market. To learn more, read the full piece: Leadership competency models.

Today’s customers are more demanding and better informed – the marketing and selling environment is more challenging, and the buying processes is more complex. As a result, there is a pressing need to make marketing more impactful.

To address these challenges, companies must have a well-designed marketing and sales methodology that reduces complexity for buyers and increases the agility of the marketing and sales process.Marketing of the future must be more personal and center on the customer, whether while creating insights, defining value propositions, capturing value (pricing), branding, communicating, or managing channels. The customer is the key.Marketing must also be more impactful, results-oriented, and data-driven. To do so, marketing cycles must be synchronized with sales and buying cycles. Lead management must be more integrated and data-driven, aligning marketing, sales, customer service or success.In addressing all of these marketing challenges, consider a partner with deep expertise in not only marketing but also sales transformation. Partners who help you to define how you will approach marketing in the future, assess your organization against it, and chart a path that integrates your sales and marketing teams will set your organization up for long-term success. Focus on creating alignment, shifting mindsets, and developing your team’s capabilities in an impactful, measurable, and engaging way.

References

Tech CEO Research Team. (2020, June 1). Ignition Guide to Conducting Customer Segmentation as a Tech CEO. Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/document/3985861?ref=solrAll&refval=338014589White, S. & Finkeldey, D. (2020, January 8). A Practical Guide to Market Segmentation. Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/document/code/464988?ref=authbody&refval=3985861

In advance of an important meeting with company executives, most leaders provide an agenda along with a set of pre-read materials.

The ask of the senior leader audience: Please review these documents before our meeting.

It seems like a simple request, except for the fact that for many of us, getting an audience to even skim our pre-read materials in advance of a meeting is a minor victory. Pre-reads are tricky. Just ask anyone who has started a meeting by asking the audience if they reviewed the slides, charts, or documents that were painstakingly crafted and shared in advance. Cue the awkward silence, as audience members explain how they were too busy, they just didn’t have time to get to it, so could you please walk through the pre-read materials now, blah, blah, blah. On the other hand, you may have one or two colleagues that seem to enjoy poring over your pre-reads, ready with their tough questions when the meeting time comes. Let’s appreciate the thoroughness of these individuals, rather than wish they were more like everyone else who just ignored the pre-reads in the first place.

Done right, pre-reads play a valuable role for leaders and teams to lead productive meetings. They provide important background and context, enabling meeting leaders to make well-informed decisions and engage in productive, strategic discussions far more efficiently.

How do we consistently create these types of meeting outcomes? Here are some simple principles to consider:

Always link the pre-read to the meeting purpose and desired outcomes. A CFO and his team had scheduled an important meeting with the CEO and executive leadership to determine future capital expenditures at the company. In advance, the team prepared a detailed set of materials for the senior leaders to review, including a 60-page document that contained important information that would be relevant to the discussion. Knowing that the meeting would not succeed unless the executives had thoroughly reviewed the document in advance, the team prepared a short note to accompany the pre-read that reminded the audience of the purpose of the upcoming meeting, the relevance of that purpose to the audience, and the role the pre-read materials would play in achieving that purpose. The simple note paid off when company executives told the finance team it was one of the best meetings any team had ever led at the company.

As the CFO shared: “The note made such a difference. Too often, we assume the purpose of the pre-read is obvious, but we must make the connection clear to the audience. It isn’t enough to send slides in advance. If you really want people to read them and absorb the information, provide a compelling reason. We learned that by saying, ‘If you read these, we’ll achieve something important together,’ made all the difference.”

Make it very easy for your audiences to be prepared. Let’s imagine that you were part of the audience described by the CFO in the above example. No matter how compelling the note and materials provided in advance of the meeting, there’s no getting around the fact that you’ve been asked to read and absorb a 60-page document. For your average senior leader, it’s challenging to find the time to prepare for meetings and one of the biggest reasons that pre-read materials don’t get the attention they deserve.

Here’s where you can help your audiences. Provide questions and answers. This easy step can be a game-changer when done right. One simple technique is to raise a few relevant questions in a short email to your audience in advance of your meeting that includes your pre-read. For example:

• What is the overall purpose of the project?
• What do we want to accomplish in our meeting?
• What role will the pre-reads play in accomplishing that objective?
• How are the pre-reads structured to enable our discussion?
• What role will you play?

Don’t forget to provide simple, bullet-point responses to your questions as part of your note. The question-and-answer format is a powerful combination that helps you set the stage for your meeting by guiding participants in advance. You’re not just sending an agenda with an attachment: You’re taking charge and helping your audience understand how to show up prepared and ready to engage in a very productive discussion with you.

Good pre-reads take time to create, and even outstanding materials may get overlooked because the value they provide may not be immediately obvious to your audiences. The moral of the story? Don’t let your efforts go to waste. Good information provided in advance of meetings leads to better discussions and smarter decisions, but those outcomes won’t just happen on their own. With a few small tweaks to your pre-meeting process, you can achieve far better post-meeting results.