This is a collection of additional insights from industry leaders to Part 2 of an eight-part series featuring conversations from the Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summit.
Leadership in the Age of Personalization
Corporate strategies were not designed to serve the unique needs of people in today’s age of personalization. Organizations and their people feel stuck with too many differences to navigate. This new environment is fueled with tension and uncertainty without a clear line of sight. As such, there is a lack of urgency, agility and desire to move beyond the old, standardized ways of doing things.
Why? Because it gets messy, and it’s hard to balance the extremes. In Part 2 I introduced the idea of the pendulum swing – when it starts moving from full height on one side, that first swing will reach full height on the other side: one extreme to the next. You can also think of it as a seesaw. The force of the response equals the force of what is being responded to. Standardization is a strong force. Our initial efforts to shake standardization will create equal force the other way. Eventually we have to find our balance.
That’s why inclusion is the most essential skill today. As we shift from an age of standardization to personalization, energizing talent will depend on how well organizations lead and serve employees as individuals. Inclusion through personalization strategies must become the de facto reality throughout every enterprise. But first, leaders must acknowledge reality:
- The way we work is changing.
- Old structures are irrelevant.
- Silos are ineffective.
- People want room to have influence.
Today’s age of personalization spooks standardization and when threatened, standardization fights back hard. Especially when leaders from baby boomer generations have been historically incentivized to standardize more when times are tough. In their defense, that’s all that they know. But that constant tension between standardization (when people are told what to do inside the box they are given) to our current age of personalization (when it’s becoming less and less efficient to have boxes at all) slows progress down, leads to poor decision making and the ability to define the right strategies for change. The luxury of time is over.
Today’s organizations must focus on culture before strategy. How do you start this process: build high-performance leaders, teams and cultures focused on inclusion and the power of individuality – so you can start to solve for the right opportunities and define the most effective strategies for change.
Today’s age of personalization spooks standardization and when threatened, standardization fights back hard.
To build high performance leaders, teams and cultures, you must invigorate a shared mission by elevating individual contribution. So I have invited leaders across industries to expand the conversation beyond the summit itself by providing additional reflections throughout this series of articles.
Here are insights from industry leaders as they reflect upon Part 2 of the series:
Shabnam Vaziri-Sadri, Organization & Talent Development Director, Equity Residential
While standardization has helped us reach higher levels of efficiency in management, personalization will improve our effectiveness in leadership. Likewise, I believe standardization has led organizations to reach greater diversity, and now it is time for organizations to employ and promote personalization in order to achieve inclusion.
To those of us who value and celebrate diversity, the different layers and dimensions of diversity feel as if we have boxed in people through a standardization effort with exclusion as a paradoxical unintended consequence. A more personalized approach along with the recognition of the individual’s preferences and contributions will lead to inclusion. While the latter effort is superior and preferred to the former, it is important to acknowledge that it could not have existed without the former as a foundational step. To escape the extremes, however, it is critical to navigate the change not only with a focus on balancing the two forces of standardization and personalization, but also integrating them into our efforts, fitting each in as appropriate.
“While standardization has helped us reach higher levels of efficiency in management, personalization will improve our effectiveness in leadership.”
Glenn Llopis
Indeed: start by interrupting our own processes in order to build diversity, but if we stop there, we only make things worse. Without inclusion, diversity is powerless. Inclusion solves for individuality, and individuality solves for inclusion. Together they solve for diversity. The next article in this series will address this in more detail.
Inclusion isn’t just about who gets hired and who doesn’t. It’s also about how employees are allowed to grow or not, within their organization. How people are allowed to collaborate or not, across the boundaries of departments and functions in an organization. How people are allowed to experiment or not, within their own jobs. It’s about how people are allowed to contribute at the highest levels of their individual capacity. It’s about a mindset of constructively disrupting our auto-pilot thoughts about who belongs where, doing what.
If you’re not giving people the influence they want, they will leave. They want to elevate and activate their own capacity to contribute to the success of the company mission in their own way.
Inclusion isn’t just about who gets hired and who doesn’t. It’s also about how employees are allowed to grow or not, within their organization.
Mike Martel, Senior Director, Rx Product Flow & Redistribution, CVS Health
Thinking through Dr. Scott Lacy’s simple but brilliant concept of “flow” it made me reflect on how leaders in the age of standardization have been trained to “fight or flight” which is in theory a solo act. With the next generation of Millennials and Gen Z workers who want to know if we see them or know them, we have the ability to flow as an interconnected group which allows us to make our employees part of the solve which then connects them to the purpose and allow for them to be their best self. By making next-generation employees part of the solution, we are solving for another issue we face every day: retention.
Llopis:
Martel makes an interesting point about fight and flight being solo acts and flow being an act of interconnection. Inclusion leads to more interconnection throughout an enterprise, breaking up silos and inviting people to influence the business in multiple ways – not just within their own silo. I agree that an organization that gives people that level of interconnection will be more successful in retaining their best talent.
Jim FitzPatrick, Director, UPS
Business cultures need to adapt to the issues and values from our future business leaders – those that represent Generations Y and Z. We know they spend a lot of time on social media, and they can sniff out canned or insincere messages in seconds — but businesses need to take the time to meet them and create purposeful conversations to engage them.
Fast Company suggests that, “Gen Z have a carefully tuned radar for being sold to and a limited amount of time and energy to spend assessing whether something’s worth their time. Getting past these filters, and winning their attention, will mean providing them with engaging and immediately beneficial experiences.”
Guilherme Oliveira’s journey through business as a Millennial was insightful. His pragmatism left little room for opaque, top-down decision-making or order-giving. Guilherme looked for and found what Michael Litt, CEO of Vidyard says about engaging Generation Y and Z in the workplace, “...when I take the time to explain why my company operates the way it does and how their roles contribute to that, they’re excellent team players. Command and control don’t work with them. Sharing the bigger picture — and being transparent about motives and outcomes — does.”
These generations won’t blindly follow without justification, and that might be their biggest strength.
Traditional corporations need to adjust to the future generation of employees by looking for ways to clarify their values and weave them into everything they do including their corporate objectives, community engagements and social responsibilities. If you give Gen Y and Z a reason to care about what you do you’ll find them more than willing to engage with you, as a company to work for, stay with and grow.
Tim Alba, Partner, Caldwell Butler and Associates
Recently, a COO of a healthcare organization shared the following: “We hire for talent and often the Millennials and Gen Zs have great content. However, they lack the proper context to communicate the content.” So how do we achieve the benefits of content and contexts to improve the ways we work?
Most organizational mentorship programs are designed in a one-way configuration: the experienced leader sharing insights, strategies and techniques with the new employee or soon-to-be front-line leader. In other words, the Baby Boomer talks at a Millennial or Gen Z. Next-generation talent is extremely bright, self-aware, and knowledgeable. Since they often lack experience in the business world, they don’t have the context to use their knowledge, know-how and “great content.” So, we tend to use the traditional, standardized, one-way mentorship model to onboard new employees to better operate in our workplace environment.
In today’s age of personalization, what if we acknowledge that mentoring should work both ways? As the “experienced” leader mentors the young mentee, what if the experienced leader listened to the mentee (to their content), to understand the mentee’s perspective, learn what is important to them, and why. What if this mentor goes beyond seeing this individual, and starts to know this individual? The mentor becomes the mentee and embraces the content, and maybe works collectively to find the context, continually rotating the mentor/mentee roles.
Llopis
Both FitzPatrick and Alba tap into something critical, which again reinforces the importance of interconnectedness: Generations Y and Z won’t automatically buy into what someone says just because that someone is older or has more experience. Opinions are valued once they’re earned, and the surest way to earn is to actually listen to the person you’re trying to share with. Opinions, knowledge, expertise – nothing will be successfully received one-way or top-down.
Again, it all comes back to those two questions: Do you see me? Do you know me? If there’s no listening, if there’s no effort to weave someone’s values into the strategies they’re being asked to implement, if there’s no interconnection, then the answer to those two questions will be an obvious “no.”
Millennials are expected to overtake Boomers in population in 2019, according to Pew Research Center. Generation X won’t pass the Boomers in population until 2028. Millennials represent a larger share of consumers of company products and services. Companies need their insight.
Business is evolving fast, and younger generations are more in tune with the changes that cater to a more informed and educated individual in the workplace and marketplace.
Kristin Gwinner, Chief Human Resources Officer, Chico’s
In business today, organizations have been working with focus on personalization for the customer experience. It is powerful, and those who are doing deploying this strategy well, are seeing the benefits. Converting personalization strategies into the workplace, to elevate the associate experience is the opportunity of the present and future.
As we begin to bridge personalization strategies from the marketplace into the workplace, I find it helpful to get clarity on the question that made people feel vulnerable at the summit: What do you solve for? This is the question that will allow us to personalize the workplace.
This question sounds so easy, but it is difficult to answer. As a leader in an organization that has thousands of associates in just as many locations, I am laser focused with clarity – that cultivating a culture of personalization is key. It is my responsibility and privilege to lead this strategy. I love the challenge of really getting to know people – to find out what they solve for and then connecting people together, so they can solve for each other’s needs. It is like pieces of a puzzle coming together.
When we take the time to get to know each other, solutions happen much faster in the workplace because we realize who has what superpower (what we solve for). And as leaders, it starts with us self-reflecting and being clear on what we solve for and “sharing our solves” so we can collectively contribute most effectively.
Llopis:
When can leaders and employees best contribute to an organization’s mission? When they know what they solve for.
What you solve for is an unusual phrase and certainly not anything the metrics from the age of standardization measured or value. What you solve for is a combination of your interests, what you stand for, and your capacity, capabilities, personal values, skills, and experiences. It’s what you enjoy and consistently think about in a big way.
Once leaders and organizations shift their mindset to knowing what their people solve for (and it can be more than one thing), they see the contributions to their organization’s success in each person’s own individual way, without sacrificing the organization’s mission or trying to standardize it.
Nicole J. Jones, Savvy Multisector Connector and Public Affairs Professional
As cutting-edge technology continues to innovate and overhaul systems, leaders and industries have come to wholeheartedly embrace and value the notion of disruption. Disruptive technology has become a critical hallmark in our daily lives, and is representative in the consideration of leadership in a personalization era. Shifting leadership approaches from standardization to personalization introduces an innovative model offering great potentiality of undeveloped and unknown opportunities.
Personalization encourages leaders to overhaul their approach from reaching equality to achieving a greater goal seeking equity. As such, this new school of leaders will be challenged to foster environments where others anticipate individualized attention and responses. This massive shift cultivates new ways of thinking that offer a potentiality of more options, heightened creativity, and a stronger sense of belonging. While the results could be very promising, this is revolutionary thinking – and even a bit scary. For that reason, this new leadership requires bold, courageous and vulnerable leaders willing to explore new territory, overcome the uncomfortable moments and missteps, and motivate those around them. It has been said that leadership is being an example, and the brave, inspirational leaders embracing the personalization model could quite possibly be the answer to the meet the divergent needs of our diverse and dynamic environments.
“Personalization encourages leaders to overhaul their approach from reaching equality to achieving a greater goal seeking equity.”
Llopis:
Without strategy, change is merely substitution, not evolution.
As you reflect upon the need let go of those part of standardization that fail that us in the age of personalization, ask yourself, your team, and your organization the following questions:
- Where do you see outdated standards in your industry and/or area of functional expertise now being influenced by personalization? What do you believe are the most evident areas of opportunity?
- Why do organizations continuously find themselves stuck in the traps of standardization? Why are leaders having difficulty respecting the need to embrace today’s age of personalization? Why do you believe this is a vicious cycle? How can organizations and their leaders start to find the right balance between standardization and personalization?
Be courageous enough to explore and address these questions. As you do, you will begin to see things about individuality and the important of personalization that others don’t, do what others won’t and keep pushing when prudence says quit.
