The Best of This Week

Preserving Your Company Culture When WFH

The pandemic resulted in a sudden, widespread shift to remote work, leaving many people feeling nostalgic for even the mundane facets of office life. Office life helps sustain organizational culture — the largely taken-for-granted beliefs and practices that underpin how people work together — but dispersed work arrangements can endanger it. Leaders can take deliberate action to protect and sustain company culture with these recommendations.

Building New Skills to Manage Through Disruption

Crisis, it’s said, begets opportunity — making the current coronavirus crisis an extraordinary cauldron in which to develop new skills. For better or for worse, the practice of core leadership skills that we all know are important (and may ordinarily struggle to implement) is no longer theoretical, having suddenly become a daily exercise. Leaders are developing new skills and seeing a meaningful payoff in three critical areas: prioritization, innovation, and humanity.

Are Leaders Hired to Tackle Racism Being Set Up to Fail?

In the midst of a national reckoning on systemic racism in America, major leadership departures have highlighted who does and doesn’t hold power. But companies bringing in new leaders to help tackle issues of race must also be mindful of the “glass cliff” phenomenon. Being elevated to high-level positions when things are going poorly can bring significant successes, but the risk of failure is also elevated.

Don’t Let Your Strategy Be Hijacked

Thanks to the connectedness of social media, it’s much easier for consumers to unite against companies in strategy hijacks — situations in which companies must adjust their strategies due to consumer backlash. These recommendations can help organizations diversify offerings to keep customers content and to monitor, preempt, and respond to disruptive strategy hijacks.

What Else We’re Reading This Week:

• Creating an anti-racist workplace requires measuring outcomes across all people practices in organizations — “from recruiting and hiring to promotions, compensation, and attrition”
• How intelligent is your AI? Here are four key questions to ask
• Five tips for data protection while working remotely

Quote of the Week:

“Opportunity marketplaces tap into all of the organization’s talent, protect employment, build loyalty, and enable the organization to effectively respond to shifting priorities in the short term and thrive in the long run.”

— David Kiron, Jeff Schwartz, Robin Jones, and Natasha Buckley in “Create a Crisis Growth Plan: Start With Opportunity Marketplaces”