In just a matter of months, an existentially fueled, record-breaking surge in quitting has turned the U.S. job market on its head, resulting in talent shortages, positions remaining open for weeks and months, and job applicants and new hires ghosting employers.

It’s an alarming trend for business leaders, many of whom have been left reeling as more and more employees drop like flies, with no skilled workers available to take their place. As a result, processes break down, things fall through the cracks, and without enough qualified staff, some businesses may even come to a complete standstill.

But with the Great Resignation showing no signs of slowing down, the time for exasperation and hand wringing is over. Instead, for those at the helm of organizations strained to the breaking point, it’s time to proactively address the situation with a new approach to staffing needs. 

Solving Talent Shortages With Radical Growth

For most business leaders, there is little to no effort put into investing in the growth of lower-skilled workers. Many look externally to fill critical positions instead of promoting internally or promote people based on how well they can handle a job without any training versus how fast they can learn and grow—both of which mean your talent options are even slimmer, not wider.

However, when faced with a significant shortage of options and critical roles to fill, there are essentially two real choices: internally promoting less qualified employees or filling these spots with lower-skilled external applicants. Leaders who successfully overcome the current talent shortage will shift their focus from desperately seeking qualified candidates to teaching their remaining and new employees the exact skills and behaviors of a high performer, leaving them with far more options and a much broader pool of recruits.

Odds are, this suggestion leaves you cold—where would you even start? So how do you know what skills and habits will get your lower-performing employees and new hires up to speed and fast? Here are four tactics for defining exactly what it takes to achieve high performance in your organization to position the workforce you have for success.

Tactic #1: Examine the differences between your top performers and other employees

When you think about your top performers being replaced by lower-skilled workers in your organization, what are the visible differences in behaviors and skillsets you notice between them? 

1. First, look ahead six months and imagine you’re losing your four best employees. 

2. Then list the specific behaviors and skillsets you value most from these team members you’re losing (e.g., they find solutions instead of complaining, they go above and beyond their job descriptions).

3. Finally, think of employees left behind in your organization who may need to be unnaturally promoted and list all the reasons they’re not ready for the job. (e.g., they lack detail-orientation, they never ask for help when they need it).

What continually comes up? This will give you a list of technical skill sets and dispositions, and habits to train for.

Tactic #2: Draw from your own leadership skill sets and behaviors

Think of what makes you most effective as a leader and how these behaviors or skills could translate to your team. Here’s a brief exercise to help you think it through:

1. Imagine you’re taking a leave of absence for a few months. 

2. Upon your return, things in your organization were not only maintained but dramatically improved. In this scenario, what actions—of yours and others on your team—must have occurred to make this a reality?

3. Or, if things completely fell apart in your absence, what aspects of your leadership were sorely missing that contributed to this? 

You don’t have to look much further than yourself and the top performers in your organization to determine what makes people great in these roles. 

Tactic #3: Mine your organization’s performance evaluations for patterns

Review your most recent performance evaluations and make a list of all the areas where people needed improvement, such as better collaboration, communication, organization, or even promptness.

1. Look for the top five overall patterns across these areas.

2. Next, think of individuals in your organization who are the very best at each of these skills or behaviors. Who on your team has never once received these as a corrective action on their performance evaluations?

3. Schedule a one-on-one meeting with each person and ask them to speak for three minutes about their strengths while you record them. Prompt them to begin with the sentence, “The reason/The way I do this so well is…” and let them explain it to you in their own words.

Before three minutes is up, you will have a list of two to five steps that anyone can follow to learn the skills and behaviors of your top performers. These will become the lessons you use in training.

The bottom line is, if we regard what we do as distinct and high quality, we are by definition saying it’s worth teaching and worth learning how to do it well. The most successful leaders will respond to this moment by encouraging radical growth in lower-skilled employees to help solve talent shortages and make a permanent impact on organizational performance.

Considering the acceleration of digital transformation in all industries, innovation is critical to remain competitive. You can bring the most viable and valuable opportunities to fruition by working through these four innovation phases.

Digital transformation projects continue to pick up pace due to the pandemic, especially in the digital business consulting and implementation space. In fact, a recent McKinsey & Co. survey found that companies accelerated the digitization of their internal operations and supply chain and customer interactions by three to four years. Due to compressed timelines, however, the execution of such projects is fraught with risk.

The best way to ensure success is to make sure you are choosing the right projects to spend your limited time and resources on. This is where having a structured innovation process can help. The innovation funnel is a concept commonly used in research and development organizations to question proof of concept and better manage risk, but it can be applied in any environment where you need to pick winning bets.

Defining the Innovation Funnel for Your Operations

A quick search for “innovation funnel” will yield hundreds of different diagrams that grow increasingly narrower. At their core, these funnels have four main phases of innovation, with opportunities to review and reprioritize after each.

1. Ideation

Often tied to strategic goals or known pain points, the ideation phase of innovation is all about capturing innovative solutions and centralizing the information for review. You can solicit ideas companywide through brainstorming sessions, hackathons, customer inquiries, and so on. Employ the five W’s (Who, what, when, where, and why) and use a template to standardize input. As you review, look for which projects could bring the most value — through new revenue streams, better enabling current resources, or other critical innovation criteria.

2. Investigation

Now that you have a shortlist of potential projects, use the investigation phase to conceptualize and compare them. This often means building a more detailed business case, researching alternatives in the market, and laying out the plan to deliver on the potential value. Here, you should consider the time to value, feasibility, and risks of each proof of concept so you can make an informed decision on the positions you select.

3. Testing

The goal of the testing phase is to develop and deploy a lightweight test that will validate assumptions and help determine a heavier investment of time and resources. If you’re considering offering a new service, is there a way to test it with current customers? Are there ads you can run to gauge interest? If you’re developing an internal tool, are there prototypes you can develop through mock-ups or low-code alternatives? When evaluating tests, do you see enough of a benefit to continue? Is it in line with initial assumptions?

4. Implementation

In the last phase of the funnel, you should start on an innovation implementation plan. You’ll need to determine the timeline, resource allocation, responsible parties, success metrics, benchmarks, etc. As with any new project, it’s important to continue to track progress and bring any learnings back into the funnel process.

Remember that the innovation funnel must work for your business and the scale of your organization. Provide clear communication across the company about what you’re looking for. Your goal should be to run the innovation funnel on a regular basis and make it a core practice.

Benefits of the Innovation Funnel

While the ultimate goal of the innovation funnel is to take ideas from concept to reality, working through the various phases of innovation has other organizational benefits. For instance, employing the funnel allows you to:

• Obtain a cross-functional view

It’s common to develop tunnel vision around strategic priorities and operational key performance indicators. By taking a crowdsourcing approach to ideation, you can expand your focus across departments and hierarchies. You may discover unknown pain points, operational vulnerabilities, insufficient resources, or other business obstacles that can be solved through thoughtful proposals. What’s more, collaboration can increase innovation success by 15%.

• See clear project value

Too many digital transformation projects get to the launch planning phase without a discernible business case or measurable KPIs. When putting projects through the innovation funnel, a baseline level of rigor is automatically applied. Why? Because each idea has been considered on its own merit and compared against others. Everyone must acknowledge whether they’ve selected a project for subjective or objective reasons. The funnel also provides a clear project management structure, and businesses with such a structure in place have 38% more successful projects.

• Understand resource project loads

Project overload is real, and it can consume your best people because they’re often tapped to be subject matter experts. Evaluating projects at each phase of innovation lets you review who you’re asking to step up. If it’s the same people over and over, consider whether the project is more important than their day-to-day responsibilities and reprioritize from there.

• Identify engaged employees

Finding your most passionate and engaged team members has never been an exact science. Ideation opportunities and follow-up projects allow for different avenues of engagement and expression that can reveal individuals you might not have come across before. You may also see people self-organize into groups that you wouldn’t have put together. Companies with engaged workforces experience 21% higher profitability, so the innovation funnel can truly impact your bottom line.

Try designing your own short innovation funnel. Take a day to weigh the potential implementation of this against other opportunities in your queue. If it’s worth pursuing, outline your business case and key tenets to shop it among your cohort. See whether there are people in your organization who are interested and have the bandwidth to take on a trial. Learn from this and iterate before generating a larger program.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. However, we are all familiar with the saying, and many of us have either been on the giving or receiving end of this at some point in our lives. Furthermore, sure, this saying may ring true when someone imitates your style or finds interest in the same hobbies that you have, but it’s meaning does not hold up in business.

Entrepreneurs are so predisposed to imitation that it pervades their ability to become innovative thinkers. No entrepreneur would ever dare call themselves a copycat. Instead, they call themselves disruptors. Nevertheless, I would argue it is the same thing.

Why is this bad for business, exactly? Let us take it back to the late ’90s. When Clayton Christensen first coined the idea of disruptive innovation, it was a novel concept full of promise and the very thing that entrepreneurs chase: power. It described the process of how a product or service would take shape at the bottom of a market and relentlessly work its way up until it eventually displaced the market’s most established competitors. Sounds like every entrepreneur’s dream, right? Except, like what happens with most business concepts, time oversimplified its meaning. 

Today, when we think of disruption, we think of carnage — the weak dethroning the strong, a process that will repeat itself for the rest of history. However, here is the problem: when we focus too much on the idea of disruption, we obsess over the quest to conquer the competition rather than figuring out how to successfully target overlooked segments in a given market to grow our companies while also bringing value to the industry and its consumers.

In other words, we should focus less on destruction and more on evolution. This requires a level of forward-thinkingness and creativity that not many entrepreneurs have, which is why so few actually “make it” big. Southwest Airlines is a perfect example of this. When the airline was starting, society believed that only the well-off wanted to travel by plane. However, Southwest Airlines chose to ignore that perspective and pioneered the first low-cost carrier model, which invited regular people into the skies to travel. As a result, they did not have to drive other airlines out of business to find success; thus, they grew the market, and success followed. Moreover, today, they are among the best-ranked airlines in the world, showing that creativity prevails over disruption. 

IKEA also shares a similar story. After opening their first store in South Korea, the resulting ripple felt throughout the country was not an evaporation of all of South Korea’s furniture stores. Instead, the opposite happened. For the first time in two decades, the market experienced a 7 percent growth rate. Rather than aiming to push out other retail stores, IKEA added something to the market that did not previously exist. Not only did they see a massive spike in sales, but this new retail experience reinvigorated a love for furniture shopping in consumers that spread throughout the area as well. 

In both of these examples, Southwest Airlines and IKEA became giants in their industries on the back of inclusivity. Their goal was not to steal business away from other companies in the market; it was to add value that did not exist at the time. I think that is my biggest issue with disruption. Entrepreneurs who white-knuckle the idea of disruption focus on taking away established products or services because they believe success is only possible when their competitors are destroyed and gone from the market altogether. Instead of innovating, they copy existing business models and aim to do it bigger and better. Sure, sometimes this works, and other times it does not, but I ask: where is the value in this either way?

There is none. By eliminating products and services from a market and replacing them with a rebranded version of the same products and services, you are not benefiting consumers at all, you are just aiding in the problem of market oversaturation. In these instances, it is evident that the end goal is not about reimagining how the market can better serve consumers and change the way they live and think, it is all about the pursuit of money. 

Profitability is one way to measure success, but it should never be the only lure of starting your own company. Instead, entrepreneurs should strive to provide value and solutions that do not already exist in the market. What inspired the foundation of your business? How do you intend to be different from other businesses in the industry? Leaders who thoughtfully and creatively answer these questions ⁠— where financial gain is not the only priority — are the ones who have the best chance of building legendary companies. For example, if Southwest Airlines would have tried to compete with other airlines that catered to wealthier passengers directly, it is very likely we may have never heard of them today. However, because they reimagined the travel industry and saw an opportunity to open up flying to the general public, they have cemented themselves as leaders in the aviation industry and set a new precipice for flying for decades to come.

Do not get me wrong — disruption is not bad in and of itself. However, it is usually never the intention of promising entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs saw the potential in opportunity rather than in destruction. This is not to say that disruption will not inevitably happen as companies expand and markets shift, but it should be a side effect of creativity, not the precursor to carnage.

An emerging commercial seaweed industry is gaining pace in South Australia and it has the methane produced by cows firmly in its sights.

Australian researchers have found red seaweed has the ability to reduce cow and sheep methane production by up to 90 per cent when mixed with stock feed. The findings have led the South Australian Government to recently announce $1.5 million over two years to support the establishment of a commercial seaweed industry in the state.

It says seaweed production could be worth $140 million a year in South Australia with the potential to create 1,200 jobs. This has also prompted the first licences to establish a commercial seaweed farm to be granted and a partnership between seaweed producers and livestock companies.

Two licences were granted in January 2021 to allow a commercial seaweed farm to be established on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula. The production leases and licences for 10 hectares within the east Point Pearce intertidal aquaculture zone, and 30 hectares within the west zone have been granted to the Narungga Nation Aboriginal Corporation (NNAC).

NNAC is working in partnership with CH4 Global, a company focused on farming marine seaweeds for commercial purposes to reduce greenhouse emissions in the livestock industry.

Meanwhile, CH4 Global has announced a world-first agreement to supply enough Asparagopsis seaweed supplement for up to 10,000 head of cattle to an agriculture hub near the South Australian city of Port Pirie.

Cattle are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions with every one of the 1.5 billion cows on the planet producing about 100kg of methane a year.

Research by Australia’s peak scientific body CSIRO found that the red seaweed Asparagopsis mixed with regular cattle feed at a rate of 100 grams per cow per day reduced methane production by 90 per cent.

CH4 Global has purchased a licence from patent owners CSIRO, Meat & Livestock Australia and James Cook University and gained regulatory approval for the material to be allowed to sell it in Australia.

The red seaweed will be cultivated by CH4 in South Australia where the company has signed a partnership agreement with the NNAC.

“CH4 believes in circular and regenerative economic principles and is extremely excited by our collaboration and partnership with NNAC,” said CH4 Global CEO and co-founder Steve Meller.

“Working with the Narungga Aboriginal Nation to generate maximum sustainable benefit for its people – jobs, training, and a leadership role in climate mitigation is what CH4 is all about.”

The first farm at Point Pearce will produce two species of red algae: the warm water species Asparagopsis taxiformis and a cool water species Asparagopsis armata. This will ensure high growth rates throughout the year.

It takes about 45-60 days for a seaweed seedling from the hatchery to grow into a matured plant ready for harvest and processing.

NNAC Chief Executive Officer Klynton Wanganeen said the algae is native to the Narungga Nation’s traditional waters in Gulf St Vincent, which have the perfect climate to grow both cold and warm water varieties of the seaweed.

“We’re in the process of planning and putting in the infrastructure for two one-hectare leases, so that we can start growing with a view to working out the optimal depth for the warm water species,” he said.

CH4 has also applied for 839 ha of potential aquaculture space across three sites in South Australia’s Spencer Gulf, around Port Lincoln in Boston Bay, Louth Bay and Tumby Bay and is looking to establish further farms.

Beyond South Australia, it is anticipated that seaweed-based stock feed supplements will be in strong demand for improved growing rates, particularly in jurisdictions like California where limits have been imposed on livestock emissions.

South Australian Minister for Primary Industries and Regional Development David Basham said the granting of the first licence on Yorke Peninsula was an important first step for the emerging industry.

“These are the first marine algae aquaculture leases and licences issued for South Australia, marking the start of a new sector for our aquaculture industry,” he said.

“This is expected to bring new economic development and employment activity to the Yorke Peninsula region, including local Aboriginal communities.

“This is a great outcome for the social and economic wellbeing of the Narungga people, while also having benefits for the whole state.”

At $3.8 trillion, the cost of healthcare in the US now surpasses federal revenue. It’s a tremendous burden for employers, and with medical debt as the leading cause of bankruptcy, consumers suffer as well.

Goodroot CEO Michael Waterbury (pictured above) says complexity drives up the cost and keeps it high. “I’ve never met an employer who fully understands the healthcare business. But after payroll, it’s often their biggest expense and it’s rising dramatically every year. It’s a black box that allows for excessive profiteering.”

Unlike sweeping initiatives such as Haven, the defunct healthcare partnership between Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, Goodroot’s approach to lowering healthcare costs is “reinventing healthcare one system at a time.”

Goodroot has affiliate companies — four new ones in 2021 alone — that disrupt one particular aspect of the healthcare industry. For example, by some estimates 80 percent of medical bills in the US contain errors. Auditing companies catch these errors for health plans, but since they’re paid by volume there’s no incentive to fix the problem. Penstock Group closes the loop with outreach to ensure the same errors don’t reoccur.

In a sense, Waterbury is the “10th man” of healthcare, trying the contrarian approach at every turn. It’s a dogged kind of innovation, and it’s working. Goodroot affiliates have eliminated over $800 million in wasted healthcare spending since 2015, and they’re just getting started.

Misaligned incentives

“We like to ignore that our healthcare system is full of conflicts of interest,” Waterbury says. “I reached a point where I couldn’t pretend the incentive to put profits over patients didn’t exist.”

Before he became an entrepreneur in 2015, Waterbury held a series of coveted healthcare executive jobs, including an executive role at the largest insurer in the US. The seed that grew into Goodroot was planted early in his career.

“In 2006, I was tasked with lowering the cost of chemotherapy in New York,” he explains. “In the data, we could see that patients were receiving chemotherapy right up until their deaths, long after any hope of recovery.

“I’m not a provider, but I know those drugs have horrible side effects and those patients died in pain. I also knew that a round of chemo generated $70,000 worth of billings at the time. Profit simply had to be a factor in some cases in the decision to continue chemo. I learned there was a term for it: ‘pouring chemo into a casket.’”

Waterbury says when he heard that phrase, he knew he had to change the status quo. But he makes it clear that he hates the game, not the players. “Oncologists should make a profit on chemotherapy. But we have to recognize that profit motivations can shape decisions about care and build a system around that.”

Employers have options

Waterbury says that employers, who generally accept 5 or 10 percent annual increases in healthcare expenses as a fact of life, have many levers to pull in order to lower healthcare costs. They just don’t know they exist, or how to pull them.

“Small businesses really get beat up in the healthcare landscape,” says Erik Wallace, president of Goodroot affiliate CoeoRx. The company launched in April of 2021 under Waterbury’s mentorship to help small employers increase their leverage in the healthcare marketplace. Wallace and his team use pre-negotiated pharmacy contracts, drug pricing outside of insurance, international prescription filing and other tactics most employers would never know to try.

Whether they’re working with CoeoRx or not, Waterbury encourages business owners to push back against rate increases. “Once you begin to use the right language and ask the right questions, you’ll find more flexibility,” he says. “Insisting on more info on drug rebates and the total cost of care can open doors.”

Companies should also consider their unique demographics and usage. Goodroot affiliate Famulus Health creates custom prescription cash price networks that provide discounts that are often lower than prescription copays on drugs your employees are most likely to need.

All of the Goodroot affiliates and their different methods of increasing healthcare access and affordability were borne out of other professionals, like Waterbury, who came to know the system so well that they could see a change that would be both feasible and meaningful.

And employers have a unique ability and responsibility to help move things in the right direction, he says. “You’re already in this healthcare fight whether you like it or not. Don’t leave one hand tied behind your back. Demand better and ask the direct questions. You owe it to your employees and their families to source all available options to fight for better care, costs and access on their behalf.”

Krill Design in Milan, Italy, has created a 3D-printed lamp made from Sicilian orange peels.

At the end of its life, you can add it to your compost and put it back to work helping new plants to thrive. The lamp is called Ohmie, and the manufacturing process involves drying and grinding up orange peels, then mixing them with a vegetable-based polymer. This gives the lamps an orange-like texture and scent that helps keep rooms smelling fresh. One lamp uses the peels of 23 oranges, all sourced from a single family farm in Sicily.

“Ohmie is special because it merges technology, design, and sustainability all in one single object,” says Krill Design cofounder and R&D director Yack H. Di Maio. “We don’t just want to make a change in design. We want to make this change beautiful and meaningful. The lamp is a revolutionary and innovative product that marks a clear step toward a future where reclaimed materials are the norm, and the line between design and eco-design is erased,” he explains.

Krill Design also takes the scraps leftover from squeezing orange juice to make trays, drinks, coolers, and sachet holders for restaurants. More than 1.3 billion tons of food is thrown away globally each year, and circular design, such as the Ohmie lamp, is one way to help tackle this problem. What useful item could you make out of food waste?