Category: Careers

Imagine that you have a new supply-chain leader starting next week. You hired her to do supply-chain transformation before the crisis took hold. But now she is joining remotely and inheriting a remote team, and her short-term, urgent priorities are very different from what they appeared to be before the pandemic. As her manager, how can you make her onboarding experience a productive one? What can you do to support her so that she’ll hit the ground running?

With 6.3 million furloughed workers in the UK and an imminent tapering of the scheme, I have been speaking to many senior HR leaders about their plans for re-engagement of staff and the challenges that may bring. These conversations have revealed hugely complex organisational design issues to contend with as businesses work to try to understand the many different iterations of what the “next normal” could look like.

The world is in a very peculiar and surreal place at the moment and there are profound impacts across all organisations. This global pandemic has shown how utterly critical a CIO/CTO is to a business’ ability to operate, grow and flourish. Now is, therefore, a fantastic time to reflect on future career goals and decide what you want to achieve. Ensuring that you have a compelling CV is an essential tool in your arsenal to help you land the opportunity of your dreams.

Being a sponsor for high potential talent within your organisation doesn’t just benefit them – it also helps you further your career. Research shows that senior managers with protégés are 53% more likely to have received a promotion. Despite this, many executives are reluctant to take on a sponsor, seeing it as an additional burden on their already stretched time or are unable to differentiate between sponsoring and mentoring.

With this in mind we invited Sylvia Hewlitt, economist and author of fourteen critically acclaimed books to speak to an audience of Senior HR leaders on how to use sponsorship to drive business results.

Up to 40% of business leaders onboarded into new roles will leave the organisation within 18 months. Successfully managing career transitions is an area that warrants investment. At our event in partnership with the Harvard Business Review and Sova Assessment, Michael Watkins, author of Master Your Next Move: The Essential Companion to The First 90 Days, explained the eight common transition challenges leaders face, how to set up leaders for success during onboarding and how to successfully manage your own career transitions.

When it’s time for a career move, many high-calibre candidates often have a number of job offers and will ask our advice on which to take. Sometimes the opportunity to prove yourself by sorting out ‘a mess’ is a sure way of adding some sparkle to your CV. But how do you distinguish between the role that will shoot you to even greater glory and the one which turns out to be a career killer?

We recently welcomed a number of CIOs, CTOs and CDOs for a breakfast discussion about the latest technology devices and their current and future business applications. Lewis Richards from the Leading Edge Forum led the discussion and brought with him a number of these devices, giving the senior leaders in attendance the chance to have a hands-on experience.