Many Employers Unaware of Veterans’ Skills

Many prospective employers have little appreciation of the strong skills that military veterans bring to civilian organizations. In my experience as a military veteran and talent consultant, employers sometimes think military experience is narrow or not easily transferred to a business setting. But veterans have a remarkable range of competencies and abilities of great potential value to today’s organization. The challenge has become one of changing some perceptions, or communicating with civilian recruiters and hiring managers the facts about veterans’ transferable skills.

Veterans generally have the inherent and learned ability to adapt to any new work setting. They tend to possess exceptional communication and leadership skills, a strong work ethic and the positive expectation they will function efficiently and effectively.

Based on the work we have been doing in helping to transition veterans to employment in the U.S. and Canada, we see that employers have a number of reasons to hire veterans:

• Work Ethic – Companies want men and women who work hard and have a service-oriented attitude, and most ex-military candidates find this easy to do.



• Accelerated Learning Curve – Veterans have a proven ability to learn new skills and concepts rapidly, entering the workforce with identifiable and transferrable skills, proven in real-world situations. This background can enhance an organization’s productivity.



• Respect for Procedures – Ex-military have gained a unique perspective on the value of accountability and can easily grasp their place within an organizational framework, becoming responsible for subordinates’ actions in relation to higher supervisory levels. They know how policies and procedures enable an organization to function.



• Performance Under Pressure – Veterans understand the rigors of tight schedules and limited resources and have developed capacities to know how to accomplish priorities on time, in spite of high stress.



• Leadership – The military trains people to lead by example as well as through direction, delegation, motivation and inspiration. Veterans know the dynamics of leadership as part of both the hierarchical and peer structures.

Veterans seeking civilian employment to identify transferrable skills and abilities that can be applied equally from one job to another and communicate these to prospective employers.

As the corporate world continues to struggle with a looming leadership shortfall, shifting demographics and a growing gap between needed and available skills it makes sense to take a close look at returning veterans.

Know Your Unique Value

Sure, you likely know what you contribute and how you add value to your employer. But are you in tune with the unique value you bring – the really good stuff that no one else has or no one else can replicate?

As Brett Simons reports in his blog, your value, what you can do uniquely well, is your currency. If you are remarkably good at helping others with something that really matters, then you will merit fair if not impressive compensation and rarely want for work.

Unique value could present itself in the form of a seasoned "intrapreneur" – a person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation. Or perhaps you have the ability to see things in black and white when others cannot see things as well, giving you the ability to make sound and profitable decisions.

As a key organizational leader, it’s important for you to understand this value and also learn about the potential limits to your value. Perhaps there are ways for you to continue to increase your value? Individual self-assessments can help to give you these insights, particularly when supported by an independent business coach who can help you to interpret, internalize and further develop this value.

Knowing your value and being able to articulate it with confidence will be your source of competitive advantage. Having such self-confidence is important in gaining trust, loyalty and commitment – tempering that confidence with authenticity and genuine caring.

Knowing your value does not mean being able to tell people how great you are. Knowing your value as a leader is the confidence that comes with having a crystal clear understanding of what it is you can do uniquely well to help others seize opportunities or solve problems that matter to them.

Enlightened leaders have a good understanding of their unique value. It’s part of the foundation in rounding out their emotional intelligence, self-confidence and marketability.

Do you know the true value of what you bring to the organization?

Stuck in a Groove?

One thing that often happens to management as they become more senior is they get stuck. As Seth Godin reports in a recent blog: “If you’ve been doing it forever, you discover (but may not realize) that the things that got you this power are no longer dependable. Reliance on the tried and true can backfire.”

We’re not talking about a lapse in memory or judgment, or a mental hiccup, due to “senior moments”. This is the reality of business life today – the skills and capabilities needed yesterday may no longer work today and the required competencies will likely continue to evolve and change over time. The old “we’ve always done it this way” spells disaster for operating in today’s ever-changing business environment. Consider the struggles that Blockbuster faces by not adapting to changing customer demands.

The best leaders make lifelong learning more than a slogan. It involves the continual pursuit of growth and knowledge that takes place throughout one’s lifetime. You can adopt this attitude for yourself and you can also foster it with your employees. Reassign people to new roles within the company or partner them with different people, or give them assignments outside of their regular scope of responsibilities. All of this will help to fuel innovation and develop new experiences and perspectives, which aid overall development – avoiding ruts.

Encourage these types of learning behaviors through regular discussions with employees. Help them to consider new ideas and new ways of doing things. And model this behavior yourself.

As the business environment changes, so too does it change how leaders need to lead. This may drive a need to create new leadership models in your organization. The goal is to align the business strategy with the leadership talent and succession needs.

Reflect, do you need to break out of a rut and keep your organization from becoming stuck?

Leadership Development Making a Comeback

After several years of employers cutting spending on training, Bersin & Associates reports that half of the companies they surveyed plan to increase leadership development budgets and almost one-quarter plan to increase spending by more than 10%.

What’s behind this change in investment strategy? Many companies fear an exodus or shortage of qualified leaders as the economy picks up and customers re-engage. Their pipelines are weak or non-existent. Executives across most industries are having a hard time finding strong managers to fill vacancies. The result is that leadership training is gaining urgency amid the stronger economy.

Companies have been tested over the past few years as they experienced heightened levels of economic turmoil and unpredictability. Weaknesses in leadership capabilities are showing. As many as one-in-two managers fail. Not just at the top of the house, but for many firms leadership bench strength is proving to be shallow.

Looking for a quick fix, many companies opted for short-term approach to declining revenues by cutting costs during the recession. Companies are now restructuring and changing their models to include leadership development as they are struggling to find managers well-equipped with the leadership capabilities and behaviors needed to handle the kinds of changes we are experiencing at an ever-quickening pace. Engagement, retention, productivity and performance are suffering as a result of poor communication, lack of customer focus, ineffective strategic thinking, and the inability to link one’s workforce with the business strategy.

As your business levels start to pick up, consider the investments in leadership development you need to make to build a pipeline of ready-now leaders at your disposal, regardless of what changes might come your way.

Harnessing the intrapreneur

Rather than making history for its deep recession and record unemployment, 2009 might instead be remembered as the year business start-ups reached their highest level in 14 years, reports a recent New York Times article. Many individuals affected by the recession are now seizing the opportunity to reinvent themselves and pursue their own business. Organizations that are seeking to reinvent themselves in the new economy are also now in a position to leverage the intrapreneurial spirit that may lie within their leadership and workforce talent. Such companies can reap the benefits of this opportunity by identifying, recruiting and developing employees who have entrepreneurial motivations and competencies.

Such savvy intrapreneurs are the types of employees who regularly pursue new business opportunities. They network and build relationships with clients and potential business partners. They take action on profitable and mission appropriate opportunities, and they demonstrate a willingness to experiment and pursue risks to further the vision. When harnessed, these intrapreneurs can drive organic growth and innovation. When misaligned, they can be hard to manage, too independently minded, and out of sync with the company’s strategy. So, it is important to identify and align these intrapreneurs efficiently and effectively.

All entrepreneurs/intrapreneurs are not created equal. As companies continue to evolve to meet the dynamics of today’s ever-changing market, some leaders may no longer “fit” their current roles and could potentially become “blockers” or engage in high-risk and unaligned initiatives that divert company energy and strategic direction. The rules of the game have changed and the players may need to change, too. If they haven’t or can’t change, then organizations will need to move them out and replace them with leaders who hold the right skills.

It is prime time for organizations to assess the leaders they have today and the skills and capabilities needed both now and in the future. Do you have the right people in place to grow, innovate and prosper? Are you tapping the potential of your own intrapreneurs?

Establishing a Culture of Distributed Leadership

Dan is guest blogging for Talent@Work and is the author of the award winning leadership development blog “Great Leadership”.

In a recent article in The Washington Post, Deborah Ancona, a professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, wrote about a concept called “distributed leadership”.

She used the term to respond to a reader’s question: “How can a senior leader encourage junior leaders to act and make decisions when they find themselves without specific guidance? How can a junior leader know when it’s right to take charge?”

Distributed leadership is basically just what it sounds like – pushing leadership, or in most cases, the freedom to act, to others. Think of it as the opposite of “command and control”.

Based on a quick Google search, the term shows up most in the academic environment. However, Deborah does a nice job advocating the concept with historical and current examples that can readily apply to the corporate environment. She cites John Buford, a Union cavalry officer during the American Civil War, and a local leader in Haiti who took matters into their own hands rather then waiting for orders from above.

Distributed leadership sounds to me a lot like empowerment, one of the leading corporate buzzwords of the 90s, as well as delegation, a term that dates back to the 1600s. The desire for autonomy, freedom, and responsibility is not something that generation X or Y has brought to the workforce – it’s a basic human desire that leaders need to leverage.

Unfortunately, just like we all have a basic need for recognition and belonging, managers and organizations will often take a deceptively easy concept and still somehow manage to screw it up.

What does it take to “let go” as a leader? Building on the points made in the Deborah’s articles, the following conditions need to be in place:

1. The right managers.
Managers have to be willing to let go of what may have gotten them promoted in the first place – being the expert, solving problems, and making decisions. Some managers learn the importance of letting go the hard way – though overwork, burn-out, under-performing and dissatisfied teams, and failed relationships. Others – those with strong leadership potential – are more naturally inclined to manage that way. It’s the hard-core, autocratic micro-managers that will struggle with it the most and most likely either resist letting go or do it in a way that could make things even worse.

In order to establish a culture of distributed leadership, you’ll need to either hire leaders with a track record of being willing and able to let go effectively, or teach managers that are wiling to but don’t know how.

2. The right employees.
To quote Spider-Man's Uncle Ben, “With great power comes great responsibility”. Not everybody is ready to assume great responsibility. There are some that would prefer to be told what to do. Then again, laying a responsibility on an employee that isn’t ready is another recipe for disaster.

Again, it goes back to hiring profiles, assessment, and development. Look for employees that have a track record of seeking out new and bigger responsibilities, that can handle ambiguity, and with strong problem solving and decision making skills.

In order to get someone ready to take on really big decisions, a leader has to start grooming them by giving them little decisions that gradually get bigger. Using Situational Leadership can help you determine when it’s time to provide a heavy dose of direction and when it’s time to let go.

3. The right organizational structure and systems.
A relatively flat, decentralized organizational structure, where there are fewer management layers and managers have broad spans of control promote distributed leadership. Increasing a manager’s number of direct reports makes it harder to micromanage them.

Organizations that practice distributed leadership build processes that embed leadership into the system – rather than allowing only a few at the top to lead.

4. Clear direction and values.Without a rock-solid vision, mission, goals, and values, distributed leadership can turn into distributed anarchy and chaos. Managers at companies like Johnson & Johnson, Google, Southwest Airlines, and Wal-Mart have lots of local autonomy but make decisions within a very clear set of boundaries.

While the term “distributed leadership” may be relatively new addition to the corporate buzz-word dictionary, it seems that there may be valuable lessons from what we’ve already learned how to do: good old-fashioned empowerment and delegation.
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Check out Dan McCarthy's award winning leadership development blog “Great Leadership”. Michael Haid, Senior Vice President for Global Solutions at Right Management, is today's guest blogger, contributing another article on hiring for cultural fit - part of a series on assessing talent.

Topics for Dan's blog are based on over 20 years of experience as a practitioner in the field of leadership development. He is currently the Manager of Leadership and Management Development at a Fortune "Great Place to Work", "Training Top 125", and "High Impact Learning" (HILO 80) company.

Previous experience includes management positions in leadership development, human resources, and training for a global Fortune 100 company, and Director of HRD for a public utility.

Dan is a member of the SmartBlog on Workforce SmartBrief on Workforce Advisory Board, and an influential voice in talent management social media.

Use of Assessments on the Rise: A Bellwether of Economic Conditions

The use of assessments for very specific purposes seems to be increasing — and that could be a lead indicator of economic improvement, especially if some of those industries occupy a position closer to the front of the supply chain.

Generally, assessment usage is a bellwether of economic conditions. When companies are hiring, they have more of a need for these evaluations. What we’ve noticed is an increase in the use of assessments both for bringing new employees on board, as well as for targeted leader acceleration — a way to predict which employees to invest in going forward.

At the same time, it’s not business as usual, indicating that economic recovery is not likely to be widespread anytime soon. Many companies are looking for either new employees to hire or current employees to develop and promote who possess very specific skill sets — “needles in haystacks”, so to speak. And the right assessments help employers identify the overabundance of less-qualified candidates quickly so they can zero in on those people with hard-to-find characteristics and high demand skills sets.

But, using assessments in this manner requires forethought. Success requires a thorough understanding of a variety of factors, including the skills and beahavioral traits the job requires, as well as the cultural fit between job candidate and organization. Additionally, companies need to determine not just what they need — but how to recognize the most appropriate candidate for the position.

Wise organizations have learned to focus on the future. Companies should make sure that assessments are targeted at longer-term, not just current, needs. What’s more, to maximize effectiveness, they need to integrate as much assessment data — both organizational and individual — as possible.

All indications are that certain industries are beginning to look for the skilled talent they need to fuel brighter economic conditions ahead, but doing so in a much smarter way this time around.

Remember: Used correctly, assessments can help companies tackle the challenges they face now — and prepare for those they’ll have to address in the future.