Three forces are shaping today’s market landscape: the transformation to digital is accelerating, workplace skills are becoming obsolete faster and we’re increasingly navigating a sea of unknowns. These trends make the job of chief learning officers and their teams a lot more challenging and at the same time massively more important. Overlaid on top of all of this is the pandemic. To be clear, the pandemic didn’t cause these forces to happen, but it did cause much of the world to confront these forces far sooner.
Taken together, these forces, along with the ongoing pandemic, beg the following question: How do you upskill or reskill workforces during a time of seismic change? Do you boost investment in hard and soft skills? Yes. Do you begin to see those skills as durable and perishable? Yes. But at a time of increasing skill obsolescence and heightened unknowability, we propose adding a new set of complementary skills called immutable skills.
The immutable skills we’re referring to, which we write about in our book, “Win With Decency: How to Use Your Better Angels for Better Business” are humility, empathy, vulnerability, gratitude and generosity. Decency is the golden thread that ties them together. In this article, we’ll share real-world examples of companies and leaders who have transformed the aforementioned qualities into immutable skills, creating better business leadership and increased competitive advantage.
Humility
Humility equips us with the mindset we need as business leaders to stop, think and probe. Humility asks, what have we overlooked? Humility fosters the positive paranoia you need to look around corners and recognize blind spots before your competition does. In this sense, humility is a fundamental antidote to disruption.
But how do you transform the quality of humility into a skill? One of the easiest things you can do to build humility as a skill is to learn something new, to be a beginner. Try this: Write down three things you’ve always wanted to do, then pick one and try it out. You don’t have to become an expert at it. You don’t even have to be proficient at it. The key is to exercise your humility muscles by learning something new.
Mark Hellendrung, president of Narragansett Brewing Co., led with humility when he described the brand this way in Entrepreneur magazine: “It’s not my brand or even our brand — it’s a public trust.” In the span of six years, production of Narragansett beer went from 6,000 cases a year to 600,000. Clearly, humility is at the core of Narragansett’s business and allows the company to prioritize its customers above everything else.
Empathy
Empathy can play a huge role across your enterprise. Empathy is essential to protecting and growing your business. It drives everything from product development, user experience and innovation to marketing, sales and communications, as well as employee recruitment and retention.
Let’s take a look at how you can develop the skill of empathy through the following exercise. A former colleague used this ice breaker for one of his team retreats. He asked everyone seated at the conference table to take off their shoes. He then asked them to take their shoes and pass them to the person on their right. Then he asked each person to put on the shoes and walk around. You get the idea. The point is to show what it feels like to walk in someone else’s shoes — literally. This kind of exercise is bound to produce more than a few chuckles and is an excellent way to get you and your team focused on empathy.
Interestingly, a 2016 Empathy Index published by Harvard Business Review found a direct correlation between a company’s empathy and its growth, productivity and earnings. HBR measured companies’ empathy through ethics, leadership, company culture, brand perception and public messaging through social media.
Researchers found that the top 10 most empathetic companies increased in value more than twice as much as the bottom 10 and generated 50 percent more earnings. Those top companies included brands like Alphabet, Southwest Airlines and Whole Foods. That same study also found that 93 percent of employees said they’re more likely to stay with an empathetic employer. Equally important, 87 percent of millennials said they would consider leaving an employer who they didn’t think was empathetic enough.
Vulnerability
Vulnerability is the ultimate bridge to connect with your audience, customer and workforce in a way that builds trust, connection, leadership and executive presence. Done well, vulnerability humanizes a leader and a company, drives innovation, eyes potential disruption and allows for a fail-fast culture.
One way to transform vulnerability into a skill involves social media. Get comfortable taking your followers behind the scenes in your posts. Reveal yourself to people, even when you think you’re not at your best. This shouldn’t be done in a way that’s damaging to your reputation, professionally or personally, but in a way that’s affirming of your humanity. In other words, share photos or videos, even on bad hair days!
One example of a company using vulnerability well is the insurance company John Hancock. Its CEO, Marianne Harrison — the first female CEO since the company’s founding 157 years ago — is leading the way. We learned about her leadership efforts from an interview conducted by Rachel Montañez.
John Hancock has created an internal initiative called the John Hancock Signature Series. The series provides a platform for employees to share big ideas and personal experiences. The goal, according to Harrison, is “to address the stigma around vulnerability in the workplace and really try to encourage people to bring their whole selves to work.” From Hancock’s website, we learned that an additional purpose of the series is to challenge the company’s “usual way of thinking and to spark new conversations at work.”
Gratitude
Gratitude has the greatest untapped ROI potential in business. Why? Because it helps drive the two things that businesses need most to survive and thrive: employee loyalty and customer loyalty.
When you think of the practice of gratitude, there’s probably nothing as ubiquitous as the “gratitude journal,” where you write down things you’re grateful for. But have you thought about creating a gratitude journal, not for yourself, but for your employees? According to the employee recognition firm Achievers, 90 percent of employees hope to be recognized at least once per quarter. Here’s something that can be done to fulfill those expectations.
Let’s say you have a team of 10 direct reports. At the beginning of each quarter, buy 10 journals. Label each journal with the direct report’s name. At the end of each day, take a moment to write down something in each person’s journal that they did that you’re grateful for. At the end of the quarter, each journal will have a list of up to 60 expressions of gratitude from you. Gift wrap each journal and give them to your direct reports. This will show them you noticed the little things along the way and that you made it a daily practice to recognize their contributions to you and the team.
A business leader who is great at expressing gratitude is Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbell’s Soup. When Conant became president and CEO in 2001, Campbell’s Soup was facing significant market and financial headwinds. According to a Fast Company article, employee morale was low, teams were dysfunctional and trust was lacking. In Conant’s words, it was a “very toxic culture.”
Conant recognized that “you can’t expect a company to perform at high levels unless people are personally engaged,” and he set out to change this. During an 11-year period, Conant sent more than 30,000 handwritten notes of appreciation to employees for their contributions — from maintenance people to senior executives.
As a result, by 2009, the company experienced a complete turnaround. Campbell’s Soup outperformed both the S&P Food Group and the S&P 500. Sales and earnings were up, and so was employee morale. In fact, the company had 17 people who were enthusiastically engaged for every one employee who wasn’t. This was a sea change from 2001, when for every two people actively engaged, one person was looking for a job. By recognizing employees at every level with small gestures of appreciation, Conant was able to transform a culture of toxicity into one of gratitude and success.
Generosity
The opposite of generosity isn’t stinginess — it’s desperation. Desperation reaches out to get, while generosity reaches out to give. You may be thinking, “There’s no way generosity can be made into a skill.” But here’s one approach we read about in another Fast Company article written by Wharton School professor Adam Grant. It’s a group exercise called The Reciprocity Ring, which Grant first learned about from University of Michigan sociologist Wayne Baker and social scientist Cheryl Baker.
Its purpose, in part, is to foster information sharing to help solve problems in real time. Each participant makes a request of their fellow team members. Those teammates then combine their collective expertise in order to match solutions to those requests. Here’s one example cited by Grant: A Wharton student of his had always wanted to work at the amusement park Six Flags. But Six Flags didn’t recruit at Wharton. Through The Reciprocity Ring, the student landed an introduction with a former Six Flags CEO.
Creating a culture of generosity can have a multiplier effect in your business. Potential benefits include fewer silos, less information hoarding, better communication, greater team collaboration and overall improved productivity.
Here’s a real-world example of how generosity can create competitive advantage. Mint.com — an online financial management tool — used free content to promote brand awareness and credibility before it launched. It published free content in the form of a personal finance blog called MintLife. This ramp-up garnered great results. By the time Mint.com was ready to launch, it had already engaged an audience of more than 20,000 people via MintLife. Mint.com was eventually sold to Intuit for $170 million. And yes, you could say they made a “mint.” But it started by offering valuable content for free.
The dividends of decency
A century ago, it took 35 years for half of what an engineer learned as a student to lose its relevance. Today, the half-life of a learned skill is estimated to be five years. When the world looks back on the 2020s a decade from now, we believe the dividends that will have counted for business leadership and competitive advantage will be the dividends of decency, driven by the immutable skills of humility, empathy, vulnerability, gratitude and generosity.
