Human Capital Briefs

In my most recent post, I described how a growing number of companies are working to support their employees in times of disaster or unexpected hardship. This week, let’s take a deeper dive into McKesson’s employee relief program.

It was just a month after the inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln. He had not won a majority vote – far from it. He’d only won about 40% of the popular vote, and some states didn’t even put him on the ballot. He only scraped a victory thanks to a very close four-way race. But despite this unlikely beginning during turbulent times, Lincoln went on to become one of the country’s most revered presidents, and one of its best orators. His best-known speech is, of course, the Gettysburg Address.

Professional service firms seeking to help companies navigate the demands of globalization face a tough challenge because advisers with the specialized expertise needed to address sophisticated issues are most often distributed throughout the firm and around the globe.

It is neither wise nor effective to turn our backs on the benefits of having a virtual work force. But it is also true that in this increasingly digital age, we stand to lose something integral to what makes organizations both humane and productive places to work

To succeed in this environment, today’s leaders must focus on using persuasion rather than direction to lead their own networks toward a common goal.

The best CEOs are excellent at growing and running a company within a known business model. What they don’t do well enough is reinvent and innovate. It’s not because they’re incompetent, they just fall short at the task.

Would you hire a surgeon who wasn’t trained in medicine or delegate a major financial investment decision to someone who hadn’t studied finance? Of course not. But all too often organizations leave their most consequential people decisions to board members who may be experts in other business domains but who are woefully uneducated about and inexperienced in evaluating C-suite talent.

Try to imagine a leader without this expertise doing your job. You’ll probably conclude it couldn’t be done. But as your career advances, at some point you will be promoted into a job which includes responsibility for areas outside your specialty. Your subordinates will ask questions that you cannot answer and may not even understand. How can you lead them when they know a lot more about their work than you do?