Risk. The word immediately conjures conflicting emotions and responses for most people. It can stress you out, or it can get your blood pumping. It can put you on edge knowing you are venturing into the unknown, with equal possibility of great reward or potential disaster down the road.

Many people think of themselves as risk-takers until it comes time to take the “leap of faith.” There is a reason people often say, “There is no reward without risk.” 

This is particularly true in business.

If I told you that you stand to make $6 million over the next year, but you must trust me with $3 million of your hard-earned money now, what would you say? And is there anything I can do to encourage you to take that risk? 
 
Yes, there is … and it starts by earning your trust, a valuable commodity today that has become harder and harder to find. The events of the last year offer multiple examples of the erosion of trust, which makes it harder to consider risk even if you can clearly see there is great reward. 
  
Trust, when earned, delivers value that few other intangibles can in conducting business, whether you are a banker, a car salesman, a leader or a media broker. In the corporate trade media business, trust is the fundamental element that breaks down the barriers of the perceived risks and provides the necessary conviction that we will deliver that $6 million return on a $3 million investment. 
 
It is my experience, as a veteran of the corporate trade business, to win someone’s trust the first time, I need to fully understand the type of person across the table: their decision-making process, the unique challenges they are facing, and their desired results. Active listening is more important today than ever before, especially given our technological tendency toward multitasking. As my friend Rodney Northern, Chief Transformation Officer with the Behavioral Science Lab in Austin, Texas, (who also lectures at the University of Texas) instructed me years ago that understanding the needs and wants of consumers as well as the customers is critical for behavioral change success. He also believes that it is also helpful to understand or assess the primary business mindset and motivation of the person you are engaging as you weigh their risk tolerance. Let me explain.
 
The optimizer mindset has to do with playing it safe and playing within the lines — you know and see the firmly established guardrails around doing business, and you do not cross them. You think of yourself as open-minded to new ideas and the ability to adapt to change, but you are dominated by a firmly established set of principles and culture of how business is done. This mindset is seeking value but only within range of what can be seen and avoiding any perceived risk for fear of failure.

The innovator mindset frees you from the limitations of guardrails, enabling you to seek a different approach than the “safe” one. It’s opening the lens’s aperture to envision a result never considered or embarking down an uncharted path. It is a keen understanding of the norms or rules but the realization that it is not necessary to always follow them.
 
So, how do you move the optimizer mindset to the innovator mindset? For the most part, it is difficult to operate in a manner counter to your intuitive nature or how you are hard-wired as a person. Rare is the person who is willing to be a change agent on their own accord rather than when they are forced to by necessity. This is where patience and active listening is so important to minimize the perceived risk factors to an optimizer. (Hand-in-hand, it is imperative to have the intuition and understanding to know when to “cut bait” with an optimizer and, as the saying goes, “stop selling the unsellable.”)
  
For all those people beating their heads against the wall trying to convince an intransigent optimizer to think like an innovator, it probably is not going to happen, so move on. To all your optimizers, what you perceive to be too risky may actually be something you are missing out on that many of your more innovative competitors are benefiting from. In the long-term, turning down $6 million and sticking with your $3 million is the riskiest move you can make.

What does it take to allow employees to have more fun in their work—and keep work from being a four-letter word? Not that much, it turns out.

Happy employees make for more productive employees. The University of Warwick, a U.K. public research facility, conducted a study of more than 700 participants and concluded that increased happiness led to a 12% spike in productivity. According to research by Ben Waber, companies can increase productivity by as much as 25% simply by making small changes at work that increase employees’ sense of fun and satisfaction, such as overlapping lunch breaks and better placement of well-stocked coffee stations.

So, it’s worth the time it takes to spread a little joy at work, whether your workplace consists of one other person, a full-fledged team, or tens of thousands of employees spread around the globe. Here are some simple but fun things others have done to make their workplaces a little more fun. Use this as a “starter set” for creating your own toolbox of fun things to try with those you work with!

1. Email some inspiration.

When colleagues are under tight deadlines or high-pressure projects, Jill Boone, assistant VP of European talent for Enterprise Holdings of Surrey, United Kingdom, emails inspirational quotes on Monday mornings—and sometimes daily. “I know they’re getting lots of other emails with tasks to do, so at least one of them is just to offer inspiration and motivation,” says Boone.

2. Stick it.

“There’s nothing quite like a sticky note,” says author Kelly Epperson. She uses the notes in two ways. One, she writes quotes, silly sayings, and inside jokes and posts them throughout her office. Sometimes, she puts them on computer screens. Two, she walks around her office with a note on her forehead that says, “I’m having a bad day!” “Just having it on immediately improves everyone’s mood. Try it!” says Epperson.

Stickers are another variation on this theme. “The most successful mood-enhancing technique I had as a manager of graphic artists,” says Rebecca Taft of PacBell, “was to use stickers when I approved something they had put together.” Forgoing the usual “Great job!” stickers used in grade schools, Taft gave seasonal stickers instead. These included little snowmen, Santas, or wreaths at Christmas; flags and fireworks for Independence Day; black cats or jack-o’-lanterns at Halloween; and so on.

“It was corny, but people really enjoyed them. Many peeled them off and kept them on their monitors. I kept a large supply on hand, so people didn’t always receive the same ones,” adds Taft.

3. Create a laugh-a-day challenge.

Employees tried to make each other laugh at Bank of America’s offices in San Francisco during the bank’s Laugh-a-Day Challenge, which they held for one month. Each employee tried to make coworkers laugh with cartoons and jokes. Winners received T-shirts and books that showcased their creations.

4. Pop it!

Donna Monroe, assistant to the chief at the Pocatello Police Department in Pocatello, Idaho, is also the force’s popcorn chef. Monroe brings a popcorn maker to work on officially named “popcorn days.” She brings along paper theater bags, flavoring salts, and butter, which she melts in the microwave as the corn pops. “Everyone smells it, and they all start gathering! Lots of smiles and thank-yous,” says Monroe.

Some workers contribute to buying the butter, oil, and popcorn. “Some just lay a dollar or change on the table to donate toward what they eat. People stand around and chat while waiting for the next batch to be popped, buttered, and bagged. It goes fast, it’s easy, and it’s fun,” she added. On other days, Monroe brings in ice cream, cones, cups, and spoons.

5. Take a five-minute music break.

Workers at California-based SecureAuth Corporation, a global identity security firm, take daily five-minute music breaks on Zoom. They receive recurring calendar requests and reminders to join the fun. Employees sign up to share a song; some have their children and families perform, while others play a meaningful song on Spotify.

Nichole Devolites, a senior manager of customer experience in Buenos Aires, went one step further and set up a Slack music channel for his team. “We had one employee perform a song he wrote with an acoustic guitar, another employee’s family sang with one of the daughters playing the ukulele, and another employee’s 13-year-old daughter played Chopin on the piano,” says Devolites.

Now ask yourself:

What can you personally do to make more fun happen at work?

What can your team immediately do to have more fun together?

Pull out a pen and paper and brainstorm.

Most startups need a business plan because they depend on venture capital funds or banks for financing.

Understandably, pitching a business idea to potential investors typically requires a business plan. But how decisive are business plans in determining the success of an entrepreneur? It’s a good question and one that by no means only applies to startups.

“Sometimes You’ll Have To ‘Zig’ When The Blueprint Says ‘Zag.’”

In his autobiography, Michael Bloomberg, No. 9 on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world with assets of $55 billion, details the earliest days of his company. One of his key insights is that rigid planning can do more harm than good: “You’ll inevitably face problems different from the ones you anticipated. Sometimes you’ll have to ‘zig’ when the blueprint says ‘zag.’ You don’t want a detailed, inflexible plan getting in the way when you have to respond instantly.” While his competitors were still busy trying to come up with the perfect final design, he was already working on the fifth version of his prototype. “It gets back to planning versus acting. We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.” Bloomberg stressed that making forecasts about new business ideas is mostly a useless and meaningless task. “The noise in the assumptions you have to make is so great, and the knowledge you have of strange areas so limited that all the detailed analysis is usually irrelevant.”

“If You Plan, You Lose. If You Don’t Plan, You Win.”

The Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma is just as skeptical as Bloomberg when it comes to rigid business plans. Worth $34.6 billion, the founder of Alibaba is now the richest man in China. When he was trying to get his business off the ground, he approached venture capitalists in Silicon Valley to raise money. The investors he met expected him to present a fully developed business plan. But, much like Bloomberg, Jack Ma did not have a business plan. His motto was: “If you plan, you lose. If you don’t plan, you win.”

But from the outset, he thought big and set very ambitious goals. Shortly after he founded his company, he told a journalist: “We don’t want to be number one in China. We want to be number one in the world.” He was so convinced of his future success that he even had a meeting filmed in his modest apartment in February 1999—as a document for the company’s later history. During the small meeting, he posed the following question: “In the next five or ten years, what will Alibaba become?” Answering his own question, he said, “our competitors are not in China but in Silicon Valley… We should position Alibaba as an international website.”

Google’s Founders Started Without A Business Plan

Larry Page and Sergej Brin, worth $50.8 and $49.0 billion, are ranked No. 10 and No. 14 on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world. They also have some things in common with Michael Bloomberg and Jack Ma. They didn’t have a fully fleshed-out business plan when they started, and they changed their business model again and again. The two creators of Google, both born in 1973, had a bright idea—they wanted to build the best search engine in the world. According to the book, The Google Story, “Neither of the guys had a clear idea of how the company would make money, though it seemed to them that if they had the best search engine, others would want to use it in their organizations.”

Pivoting

Are all of these examples just exceptions? Just how important are business plans? A 2010 scientific study compared the growth of more than 11,000 companies. The study found that planning improved business performance. However, the study also demonstrated that this applies more to established companies than startups. And the researchers stressed that for any business plan, setting goals and being willing to change the business model is more important than trying to predict business developments in detail.

An important concept in terms of understanding the success of many startup companies in Silicon Valley is “pivoting.” This involves being prepared to radically change the original business model at a moment’s notice. The goal is not to implement an original concept and prove how good the initial plan was. The goal is to establish a strong market position. If that means abandoning the plan and giving the company a completely new and different direction, then it’s time to pivot.

Deals are good, but relationships are better. By choosing to serve the client over chasing sales, you can play the long game — and succeed.

If you’re in sales, you know that closing deals is critical to your success. But deals, as fun and potentially life-altering as they can be, are fleeting. Consumable. Perishable. Non-recyclable.

All to say, deals don’t make a long-lasting, successful sales career. So what does? Relationships.

Client relationships, when genuinely developed and nurtured over time, are enduring. They are as self-sustaining as they are satisfying and rewarding. And they create successful sales careers with serious staying power. 

Moreover, sans relationships, selling is simply a series of transactions — just one short-lived deal after another. You may meet your quota and make a good living, but feel like a frantic Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day.”

Deal or No Deal

In my eight years in sales, I’ve spent too much time myopically focusing on my deal funnel.

Sure, I have consistently exceeded my quotas and earned plenty of recognition and rewards. But I’ve also paid a price. My chosen approach — deal first, relationship second — has been tiresome, a nerve-racking, never-ending cycle of chasing sales.

Recently, however, I have recognized this Sisyphean story and changed my ways. I’m now focusing my energy on the relationship cycle. In fact, as I write this article, one of my clients and I are approaching our 17th project in less than 11 months. And though these current projects may be smaller than some large “one and done” deals I’ve closed in the past, they’re giving me greater peace of mind: Instead of hunting for big game, I am planting and watering the seeds for a self-sustaining, flowering field of crops.

The Six Stages of Sales Relationships

In his “Little Teal Book of Trust,” renowned author and sales trainer Jeffrey Gitomer talks about the six stages of sales relationships. Such a progression is important, as it’s a road map to cultivating meaningful, long-term relationships with clients. This not only improves your work but also increases your worth to any employer — present or future. After all, when your clients begin to value you over your company itself, you become a hot commodity.

Here’s my interpretation of Gitomer’s six stages, with a fast tip on how to progress from one stage to another.

1. Transactional Vendor

You may be closing deals, but you’re all push and no pull. To progress to the second stage, change your conversations from products to solutions, concentrating on outcomes that are timely and consequential to the client.

2. Likeable Vendor-Provider

You get the job done, always with great service and care. But in the sales world, that’s a dime a dozen. To progress to the third stage, go deeper, including advancing your active listening skills and demonstrating a real desire to do even more.

3. Valuable Provider

You are more than earning your keep, but this is no time to rest on your laurels. To progress to the fourth stage, you need to differentiate yourself, boosting both your value and credibility. One strategy is to become a subject matter expert, or SME, or to have access to appropriate SMEs within your company.

4. Impactful Expert

You are really upping your game, providing a crucial, differentiated expertise. To progress to the fifth stage, you must perform at this level every time — like clockwork. Also, take a pass on work that isn’t a best fit, ask illuminating questions, and focus on foundational areas to your client’s business.

5. Credible and Respected Expert

You are a star. To ascend to the rarified air of the sixth and final stage, however, you have to be a lifesaver to the client — helping them save or successfully transcend their career — and propel them beyond their own expectations. Additionally, it’s vital that you enjoy each other’s company and perhaps are even friends outside of the day-to-day. And you must be highly versatile, unfailingly selfless, and totally transparent.

6. Trusted Advisor

Congratulations! You, sir or madam, are a consummate sales professional. You’re continuing to make a game-changing difference in your client’s career, providing ongoing counsel, expertise, insights, and opinions. In fact, they probably think of you as an extension of themselves. You should be very proud to be here — at the pinnacle of your profession — as only a select few ever reach this perch in their entire career. It’s here that you can appreciate the quiet at the top while you sip piña coladas at President’s Club.

Also, it’s important to note that these final three stages aren’t fully in your control. They require you and your client to value business relationships to a similar extent. What’s more, forcing the issue may have negative consequences, such as a client potentially taking advantage of your time and resources. But worry not. Even making it to the third stage can be extremely positive and productive.

So, yes, deals are good, but relationships are better. By choosing to serve the client over chasing sales, you can — and will — create a successful sales career with serious staying power.

Career coaching scares most leaders. It conjures up images of employees flowing out the doors to the competition. This is flawed thinking. Your employees care about their careers. The fact that they are already working for you does not diminish the profound level of concern talent has about growing, learning, and succeeding.

As you read this, you face a talent shortage and high turnover. People are quitting their jobs at a historically unprecedented rate. Additionally, 60% of middle-income Americans are considering making a career change (source: Harris Poll-Fast Company Magazine). This tsunami of movement in the labor market requires a savvy leadership response. One that is:

• Highly personalized and customized to each individual employee.
• Brave and transparent, giving employees honest, ongoing feedback.
• Utilizes a career assessment that allows employees to author their future.
• Bases the career coaching process on a transitional model that guides healthy career development.
• Allows employees to grow at an accelerated rate if they have met their goals and earned the right to advance (regardless of their age or years of experience).
• Coaches’ employees out of the organization if their talent and dreams will flourish elsewhere.

Unfortunately, there are some obstacles you will face if you move in this direction. Here are a few:

Hurdle One: Fear they Will Leave

For years and years, managers have focused on performance in the service of the organizational mission. They avoid discussing careers or career development because, as I said before, they think career coaching will lead to unwanted turnover.

Research consistently finds that employees are vested in staying and succeeding in your organization. They leave because their needs are not getting met, or your competition is doing a better job attracting talent. There are a few random job hoppers out there but, for the most part, your talent does not want to leave. Focus on giving them more reasons to stay.

Hurdle Two: Internal Competition

How many of your managers and supervisors truly want their employees to shine and reach their full potential? If you are honest, it’s a short list. No matter how much leadership training and business coaching you have offered, leaders use their power to propel their own career forward. They do not see their people as the first priority. Rewarding your leaders for amazing career development, and giving them career development tools, will begin to shift this toxic dynamic.

Hurdle Three: Retribution or Career Damage

Talent does not tell you the truth about their career-related concerns or aspirations because the price paid can be devastating. If they open up to their boss about their career dreams, they might be blocked or punished for wanting too much or not falling in line with productivity goals. If they go to Human Resources, they might be labeled as a trouble-maker.

Making it safe to be honest is hard. Your top management team will need to model the way, demonstrating (in a very public way) that individual career development matters. Decisions made to support talent growth at the senior level will give your workforce the confidence to tell the truth about their goals.

Hurdle Four: Old-School Recruiting

If your recruiting team fills orders with little management involvement or attention to longer-term organizational objectives, you are falling behind. Explore establishing a talent acquisition partnering program. Integrate career coaching questions in the interviewing process to determine how well the candidate knows themselves and how well they fit into the strategic objectives for the position. Make everyone in your organization part of the hiring team to bring on the very best people you can find.

The final step is consistency. Just bringing up the career conversation once or twice a year will not protect you from a talent drain. All managers and supervisors at every level should be trained to deliver career coaching, or contracted career coaches need to be made available. This highly personalized strategy will make your organization stand out as the employer of choice who goes the extra mile for their people.

As a result of toxic business leadership in America, there is a post-pandemic “Great Resignation” trend caused by 5 deadly sins of employee inequity. Business leaders must find better solutions to attract the best talent, increase equity and reduce turnover costs by thinking differently. 

The Washington Post (and many other outlets) recently reported on a disturbing employee resignation trend in the U.S. where millions of people are choosing to leave their current employers en mass seeking greener pastures. According to The Washington Post, about 4 million workers resigned in April. If this trend continues, it could be devastating to company productivity and bottom-line results. And the underlying root cause seems to be a fundamental shift in satisfaction with the status quo of work caused by ego-driven bosses. 

What is Employee Equity?

Not to be confused with that other E word – equality, employee equity means eliminating privilege so everyone can fully participate and capitalize on opportunities. There are a myriad of privileges the higher up one moves in an organization, including authority over hiring, promoting, and firing; creation of processes and procedures that others must follow; deciding how different people should be compensated; choosing who gets rewarded in the company and why; and even receiving legal protections not available to employees downstream should a lawsuit or scandal occur. 

The misuse of the privilege of leadership due to toxic ego-driven bosses causes the five deadly sins of employee inequity:

1. Privileged Hiring 

If you read between the lines of any typical new hire job requisition today, you will see that most people don’t qualify for many opportunities in companies. By stipulating years of experience, education level (with a preference for advanced degrees), and other minimum skills and capabilities, recruiters are really saying that working here is a privilege reserved for only a select few candidates who meet our strict requirements. Headhunters are often tasked with seeking candidates from select previous employers or educational institutes. This is where the perception of scarcity and inequity begins with these more rigid criteria, resulting in a less diverse pool of potential employees (which is exactly the point).

2. Sink or Swim Onboarding

Once a candidate runs the gauntlet of recruitment and becomes a new hire, they are often confronted with an indifference to their initial success. A mechanical onboarding process is the norm and focuses on rules, standards, and ways of working that have little meaning. Very few onboarding processes enhance the initial excitement of starting a new job with a manager equally excited by the newcomer’s presence and dedication to their success.

3. Talent Whitewashing

Since the initial job scope was so narrow and restricted, prospective employees should be alerted that most employers are not looking for new ways of doing things or their unique approaches and talents. Instead, many hiring managers are only seeking a uniform approach to the work that must be done. This is why the longer a role, the more one’s manager focuses on mitigating anything perceived as weakness related to the role or the individual performing it. This approach leads to a scenario where the only way to get promoted is to be a boss pleaser and make them look good – and the more vanilla one becomes – the more success one can attain.

4. Overly Complex, Careless, and Confounding Compensation

New employees soon learn that their compensation is based on a tiered model that is supposedly objectively grounded by external market surveys for those performing similar roles across an industry or sector. The company’s goal is for most employees to sit below the market median. What they don’t know is that within their existing enterprise, the variability in compensation for similar roles varies wildly based on a) tenure, b) whether the employee was developed internally or recruited externally, c) how the company perceives the importance of their role or function, and d) the degree to which the hiring manager goes to bat for the new employee. And for those in variable incentive-based roles – determining which results equal top performance versus average is often so complex that employees can’t even clearly articulate how they get paid.

5. Targeted Termination

Even if an employee successfully navigates their way from new joiner into the management ranks, they never get out of the shadow of the specter of involuntary termination due to company performance, unexpected financial crises, or senior executive whims. And in these scenarios, it is quite common for a last-in, first-out (LIFO) approach to be applied regardless of the rationale for the mass layoffs. Executive leaders rarely live in the shadow of the random workforce reduction ax because they are deemed essential to delivering the target savings for the organization’s good.

Overall, these five business sins combined communicate the inequitable messages that it is a privilege just to be selected to work for many employers, onboarding and personal developments are sink or swim, and employees must adhere strictly to what is valued in this organization. One’s unique perspectives or talents, compensation differences, and gaps will be explained away with market comparison graphs and complicated language about incentive triggers, kickers, and multipliers. And even if one performs admirably by the rules of such a system, termination can still lie around every corner due to no fault of the employee. 

The scary fact is that these five deadly sins exist and persist in nearly every U.S. company and are even justified as necessary evils of doing business. But with employee equity conversations on the rise, now is the time to confront each of these sins and eliminate the unnecessary privileges inherent within them. It begins when managers lean into J.E.D.I. leadership principles of eradicating injustices, eliminating inequities, expanding diversity, and enhancing inclusion. Here are five ways J.E.D.I. leaders overcome these evils of employee inequity:

1. Hire for Behaviors, Not Pedigree

It may be difficult for most people to attend the best universities, achieve advanced degrees in a given field of study, or get hired by the best companies early in their careers. It is far more equitable to hire people based on a set of behavioral competencies such as the W.H.O.M. (work ethic, heart, optimism, and maturity) criteria that I innovated as a General Manager working in Indonesia and Brazil. Hiring based on W.H.O.M. prioritizes work ethic, shared purpose, passion, solution orientation, and maturity over previous experience and educational background. When the privilege of expensive unattainable education and resume-friendly experience is diminished, you can truly see the human you are hiring for the role. This type of hiring also anticipates that no matter what someone has done before joining an organization, they will need an effective onboarding and development program to truly thrive.

2. Go Overboard on Onboarding

There is nothing more crucial for a new employee than spending quality time with their hiring manager to understand the expectations of their role, the support they can expect to receive, the preferred styles of communication between employee and manager, trust builders and trust breakers they have in common or not, their respective talents and how these can be best manifested in the role. As I call it, this process of Interviewing eliminates the privilege of tenure as every employee is appropriately level set and supported on their unique journeys by their J.E.D.I. Leader who is there to guide them to success versus see if they crash or burn.

3. Turn Talent into Strength

Most managers see roles when they look at their employees, but J.E.D.I. leaders see each individual’s potential that they need to untap to accelerate team and organizational success. They revel in the different skills, capabilities, and ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving they have acquired with each new team addition and obsess over how to maximize everyone’s talents and the team’s performance as a whole. Doing so means to lean into what makes each employee unique and special and derive more from their diversity while mitigating any derailing behaviors with targeted feedback. When leaders look at people through the lens of talent, it transforms their perception of the value of diversity and lets them assign leadership responsibility to others.

4. Compensate Consistently

Rather than doing market studies to create artificial compensation bands, J.E.D.I. leaders influence the salary process by insisting on an internal Pay Equity Audit to show the variability in roles due to ethnicity, educational background, tenure, internal vs. external origin, role necessity variances, and manager influence. Any pay gaps identified during such an audit can be immediately addressed by harmonizing compensation internally and then comparing it to market medians as a sense-check. The goal is to remove bias and subjectivity from compensation as much as possible. And incentive-based roles should recognize that there is an inherent privilege in certain high-value territories, tenure once again, and investment in selling skills. Creating simple incentive systems that group compensation attributes (experience, business territory value, etc.) and remove bogus criteria can demonstrate to employees that business leaders want everyone to succeed, regardless of their starting point in the role.  

5. Make Termination the Last Resort

In business, reducing costs can inevitably impact overall performance. As an organization’s people cost is often the biggest financial burden, most management decisions turn to payroll when savings are required. But because this is a clear area of privilege in that senior managers rarely place the ax to their necks first, J.E.D.I. leaders take a contrarian approach to downsizing because they don’t view employees as an expense. Instead, employees are viewed as the productivity and efficiency center of the organization. And the key to unlocking greater productivity is elevating managers’ capabilities to cultivate high-performance teams versus cutting people. So rather than resorting to redundancies for the sake of the bottom line, the best leaders shift investment towards training and development for their front-line managers as a way to enhance employee experience directly. As a result, employees will be happier and produce higher levels of customer satisfaction. 

As someone who has executed more than my fair share of corporate-mandated downsizing, the disruption to customers has rarely been worth the marginal gains in cost savings that flowed to the bottom line. Had we been more patient and invested properly in our people, our accelerated growth would have outstripped these artificial savings.     

The message to businesses is a call-to-action to use the J.E.D.I. leadership approach regarding equity by valuing high-performance behaviors much more than past experience and educational pedigree. 

With this modern leadership approach, a line manager should serve and support employees to succeed by clearly demonstrating expectations and helping them achieve while developing their innate abilities. No matter where they started at the company, employees should have just as much opportunity for success as someone who’s been there twenty years or more. You hired them because of their unique way of thinking, feeling, and behaving. As a manager, your role is to help them apply their special talents productively by teaching them to consistently deliver near-perfect performance in activities they LOVE doing. 

Make it your mission to ensure employees are paid commensurate with everyone else in the same role, regardless of age, ethnicity, gender identity, disability, by removing subjectivity and bias from the compensation system. 

Your goal should be to invest in employee development for the long haul while dealing with the ups and downs of performance together – and in the unfortunate event of necessary downsizing, those who make the most will be the first to be asked to leave.

Is this concept a bit utopian? Well, it depends on your vantage point. But from where I’m sitting, when 4 million people decide to opt-out of the existing system in a single month, all options need to be on the table to fix the situation, and eradicating inequity needs to be at the top of the list to assure employees that they are not wasting their lives working for employers who place no value on their livelihood or wellbeing.