LEADING MEETINGS IS A LEADERSHIP COMPETENCY

Earlier this spring I spoke to a group of university seniors and graduate students. They want to know what they need to be successful when they enter the world of work.

You can probably guess that my first answer is the ability to listen because it’s at the heart of influence, creating relationships, dealing with complaints, and demonstrating empathy.

My second answer is process skills—the ability to participate in and manage group conversations. Individuals can improve their influence and impact by sharpening their process skills.

Here are six reasons why doing so is a worthwhile investment of your time. Much of this first appeared in an article I wrote for Harvard Business Review.

1. You’ll set yourself apart. The ability to manage conversations so they are productive, inclusive, and focused on getting work done is an organizational skill that transcends expertise. Being really good at a core discipline (say, marketing, business development, or social media) is important, but being an expert only gets you so far. If you can add the ability to facilitate conversations to your repertoire of skills, you’ll add more value to your organization.
2. You’ll gain stature. Your colleagues will respect your ability to make their time in meetings productive—even more so if you can manage the conversational processes with very little attention to your own views. You are not doing this to get noticed, but it never hurts to be known for having a critical skill set.
3. You’ll create productive relationships. The entire process of determining what should be on the agenda and interacting with colleagues about the best way to have a successful meeting gives you insight into what matters to people. Relationships are built on a series of conversations where people can express themselves fully and be heard. If you can do this, you’ll build a network that you can depend on outside of the meeting as well.
4. You’ll enhance your powers of observation and learn to stay out of the conversation. Managing a meeting requires careful attention to the dynamics in a room—for example, whether someone needs to be brought into the conversation or an action item needs to be assigned or the discussion has gone off track. Facilitating a meeting also requires learning to withhold your own ideas and questions and focus on the input and thoughts of others. Many of us need practice at interrupting less, listening more deeply, and resisting the urge to turn the conversation to our own views or experiences. These are important leadership skills in and out of meetings.
5. You’ll become valuable beyond your own group. If you become known in the organization as someone who can manage conversations effectively, you’ll likely be asked to help with other meetings. You may not be interested in becoming a professional facilitator, but even leading one or two meetings a month for other parts of the organization will build your network and knowledge of other functions.
6. You’ll contribute to your boss’s success and respect. Offering to design and lead the next meeting for your manager is a gift in several ways. Many managers simply don’t have the time to determine what needs to be on the agenda and how best to get the broad participation required for alignment. Being able to focus intently allows the manager to pick up on the nuances people express, verbally and nonverbally, and to listen for any organizational perspective or background the group needs.

Trust and respect are based on our ability to be effective in conversations, including meetings.  It might be time to devote yourself to mastering group conversations.

Listening is a master skill for personal and professional greatness.
—Robin S. Sharma, Canadian author

- Paul Axtell, author of Compassionate Leadership

EVERY ENTREPRENEUR HAS HAD TO CHANGE THEIR BUSINESS MODEL, HERE IS HOW

If you're doing the same thing today that you did yesterday, chances are it's the wrong thing. No matter what industry you're in, you're facing a business landscape that's constantly changing, evolving, getting disrupted--and fiddling like BlackBerry at an iPhone release party won't get the job done. So if your business model isn't set up right now for future success, you'll need to continuously anticipate, evaluate, and adapt. And if it is ... same advice.

Of course, changes in strategy vary widely by kind and degree. Unless it's early days for your company or something's gone horribly wrong, you probably don't need a full-on pivot from selling ice cream to developing bioweapons. In most cases, the sweet spot is somewhere between that and, say, Blockbuster Video trying to fend off obsolescence with higher late fees.

Sure, it's all a lot to take on, but here's a good place to start: We've spoken with a host of entrepreneurs who saw a storm coming, changed direction, and came out on the other side with a sparkling new ship. 

Change Agents

Many of America's highest-profile companies didn't start with the business models they're known for today. Here are some of the most interesting transformations.

GROUPON
BEFORE: A site that organized people to accomplish a goal and donate money to nonprofits
AFTER: A site for getting group discounts offered by merchants 

YELP
BEFORE: A business-search site based on referrals in users' networks
AFTER: A crowdsourced business review site

NETFLIX
BEFORE: A DVD-rental service
AFTER: A platform for streaming video and original programming

SHOPIFY
BEFORE: An online snowboard equipment store
AFTER: A multiservice platform for online retailers

NINTENDO
BEFORE: A maker of playing cards
AFTER: A video-game and consumer-electronics business

SLACK
BEFORE: A multiplayer video game
AFTER: A workplace-communication tool

ECOLAB
BEFORE: A carpet-cleaning product for hotel rooms
AFTER: Water purification and energy services

INSTAGRAM
BEFORE: A location check-in site where users shared photos of themselves with friends
AFTER: A photo- and video-sharing social network

YOUTUBE
BEFORE: A video-dating service
AFTER: An online video-sharing platform

THE ECONOMIC INDICATORS YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT IN 2022

With a new year comes new beginnings -- and new ways of looking at things. As we enter 2022, we were wondering what small-business owners could be looking at to find information that helps them.

To get answers, we spoke to a well-known figure in the world of financial and economic analysis, George Pearkes of Bespoke Investment Group. He regularly appears on financial-news TV shows to talk about the latest developments in the markets and has a reputation for digging deeply into obscure data to generate uncommon insights.

Before digging into specific information, Pearkes said that it can be more important to know what to filter out. "There is a lot of room to present economic data and analysis from a perspective that's motivated," he said, and it's important to keep in mind that a great many offering insights are "selling a product or advancing an ideological agenda." 

When Pearkes looks at data measuring small-business owners' sentiment, he sees evidence of the influence of these sources. When the NFIB asks small-business owners how they feel about their business, Pearkes noted, there are wild swings due to political changes that have little to do with anyone small business's prospects, while economic news produces less volatility in business-owners' opinions.

We asked him to turn his lens toward the world of small business and tell Inc.'s audience what he would spend his time looking at if he were a small-business owner in 2022.

An approach to economic analysis for SMBs

If Pearkes were going to create a dashboard of economic indicators for small businesses to look at to assess their business's near-term prospects, he'd start with:

• State and local employment data
• Homebuilding data

Why those two? "It's definitely helpful for businesses to know, 'Is the population rising? Is consumer spending rising?'" Pearkes said, and "anything more generalized than [housing and unemployment data] is just not available with public datasets" that are updated on a frequent basis.

Beyond those more immediate indicators, there's an opportunity to develop a "medium-to-longer" look at local demand, he said, specifically "population consumer spending and gross value added."

The thinking behind those is generated from an underlying theory of what generates demand for a small business. Pearkes asserted, "If the economy is on a good path, if employment is rising, that's going to fundamentally change the things that you look at as a business owner in terms of a basic strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis." 

The broad themes worth tackling start by asking one question: "What's the trajectory of aggregate demand?" according to Pearkes. "From there, you then spill down into other problems, like 'How do I expand my margins or improve my return on capital?' and asking 'Where are we in the economic cycle -- how fast is the economy growing?'"

For many small businesses, local economic indicators are especially important, and, he said, "Local is tough, because we have decent state-level data that isn't super lagged, but at the metro level it's [often too] lagged to be useful." Sticking to just the numbers that are well-covered, like the numbers mentioned above, is a way to get data that's reliable, meaningful, and fresh.

Finding a theme in broader data

What about national data? Depending on your industry and what's going on in the broader economy, the specifics relevant to your business could vary broadly. Pearkes recommends working backward from a national issue that affects your business and then finding a metric that tracks it closely.

For example, during the supply chain crunch that the U.S. is currently experiencing, "auto production is a really interesting thing to keep a close eye on," Pearkes said, because "understanding how many finished cars are rolling out of factories is really helpful for understanding the supply chain." It's an indicator important enough to the national economy to be regularly tracked and publicized, but can be used by any business as a proxy for how the supply chain crunch will affect them.

Other statistics to keep in mind:

• Prime-age employment to population, which tells you how the 25- to 54-year-olds are doing. This data is valuable both for tracking demand and for figuring out how difficult it will be to hire.
• Actual GDP data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the more-frequently updated, but less accurate, Atlanta Fed GDPNow tracker. This tells you where overall economic growth is going.
• The New York Fed's Weekly Economic Index, a seasonally adjusted composite of economic data.
• "A whole bunch of cool underlying data sets from the ISM," which tells you about supply and demand in manufacturing.
• A wide range of data from the five regional Feds that produce manufacturing data.

For all of these, you can look at your own business's trends over the past number of years, and what these indicators looked like at those times, to get a sense of what your demand and hiring picture will look like when the metrics go this way or that.

Think about who speaks for you

Adding up all of his thoughts about operating as a small business and looking at economic data, Pearkes warned that it's easy to get confused about what exactly is being talked about when talking about small business. "A full-service restaurant in a major metro area is subject to competitive forces in a way that a fast-food chain in a rural area just isn't," he said, but economic reporting and agencies that claim to speak for small business often conflate the two.

When someone calls themself a "small-business owner" or says they "speak up for the interests of small business," the fact that the world of small business has some large, very distinct groups of businesses means that those people or agencies might not be speaking of businesses at all like yours.

As one indicator of this difference, Pearkes spoke about how differences in measuring small businesses can produce very large discrepancies. "If I'm a franchisee and I own 10 restaurants," there's the opportunity to be seen as many small businesses or one larger business, he said. Two different measures of employment in small businesses take different approaches: Payroll processor ADP measures employment at small businesses at the individual-restaurant level, "on the basis of establishments, not firms," he said, and recently had a tally of 32.3 million people employed in small businesses in the U.S. The Bureau of Labor Statistics takes the reverse approach, measuring by firm instead of individual establishment, and has a number that's a third smaller: 21.2 million people.

When reading economic analyses of small businesses, it's important to keep this difference in mind, because the takeaways and advice might be speaking to a category of small business that is quite different from your own.

BY STEVEN I. WEISS@STEVENIWEISS

IN 2022, GET READY FOR THE GREAT ONBOARDING

It's now been more than six months since the term "Great Resignation" started hitting headlines, as employees facing rising costs ventured out on a mass scale to look for better wages and better experiences. The term has taken on a life of its own, with countless articles, a Wikipedia page, and even as the title of a book.

But so far, coverage of the "Great Resignation" has focused on the negative: the workers that businesses are losing. More than half a year after the start of this great exodus, it's time for leaders to look at where employees are headed next and to get ready for the next phase of the ever-changing employment situation: "The Great Onboarding."

My workplace, Qualtrics XM Institute research, found that 72.4 million U.S. employees (52 percent of the workforce) are likely to look for a new job within the next six months. That's a 14 percent increase from 2019. It's clear that today's employees will not be complacent, staying at companies that aren't keeping up with new demands for safety, flexibility, and better compensation. And as millions of workers join new organizations in 2022, the onboarding experience will be key in shaping how they view their new employer and how long they intend to stay.

While businesses continue to navigate the risks and opportunities of this dynamic environment, leaders who focus on upgrading their workforce will be able to capitalize on market shifts to attract and retain new talent looking for a better work experience.

The make-up of today's job-seekers.

First, it's important to understand who today's job-seekers are. The largest group of job-seekers is between 25 and 34 years old, and 55 percent of the total job-seekers are between the ages of 25 and 44, according to the Qualtrics XM Institute research.

Many of the employees in this age group, who are in the middle of their careers, experienced a shift to remote work. This untethering of their jobs to a specific location pushed many of them to rethink the relationship between their work and life, and now they're looking for more flexibility around where, when, and how they work.

Companies relied heavily on senior leaders to manage through the pandemic, and that is now taking its toll as well. Sixty-two percent of department managers and 72 percent of managers of multiple departments are likely to look for a new job in the coming months.

It's been a stressful couple of years for just about every leader who's dealt with shifts in customer demand in addition to big changes in how their teams work. As we get closer to the stabilization of the COVID crisis, many simply need a change of scenery and the chance to feel reinvigorated.

Reimagining the onboarding experience.

Rather than overly focusing on the many employees who may be leaving, leaders should turn their attention to retaining their strongest workers and hiring new employees that will propel the organization forward. This is an opportunity to upgrade the workforce by providing better experiences.

The onboarding experience in particular is often under-resourced and under-designed. Many employers fail to honor the massive shift in a person's life that comes when starting a new job. With so much anticipated turnover, it's critical for organizations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their onboarding efforts now, in order to help employees feel a sense of belonging and value, even if they're working remotely.

Companies welcoming incoming employees will do well to remember that job-seekers are looking for more flexibility, reinvigorating opportunities, and relief from burnout. Leaders should take an empathetic tone, highlighting their commitment to employee needs and benefits, particularly regarding mental health. Sharing a clear and compelling vision for the organization will also encourage employees looking for a fresh start and enable organizations to tap into the full range of their abilities.

Investing in a great onboarding experience will accelerate the process of turning new hires into engaged and purpose-driven employees and will help replace resignation with retention.

BY BRUCE TEMKIN, HEAD OF QUALTRICS XM INSTITUTE@BTEMKIN