Reset by Johnny C. Taylor Jr . was published on October 27, 2021. The book provides a guide for modern leadership and talent management in times of crisis and upheaval. It offers insight into the challenges that leaders face and provides a playbook for reinventing enterprises.
The book emphasizes the importance of selecting, training, and retaining employees and transforming workplace culture to adapt to the rapidly changing business landscape. Reset has been praised as a Wall Street Journal bestseller and a must-read for anyone leading an organization in the current age of disruption
A Message to Leaders
As we look at leadership through a new lens, it’s important to consider the greatest capital of any organization—talent. The organization succeeds not with trite perspectives on unleashing human potential or driving greater growth but through a deep examination of how the organization reinvents itself regularly through effective talent management. We have all heard the old adage, “Never waste a good crisis.”
Here’s a friendly amendment: “Make constant reset your friend.” Upheaval brings about opportunities to rethink, reset, and restructure your organization.
The Power of the People You Overlook
- To win the future of work, look past traditional talent pools and leverage differences for growth and innovation.
- Finding a model for great inclusion is almost impossible. No one is getting it right.
- Some are simply trying harder than others with programs ranging from truly inclusive leadership development to social efforts for seeding relevant fields.
- Leaders should invent, invest, and implement those programs best suited to their culture and communities.
- Define diversity as more than intersectionality.
Bridging the Skills Gap
Nothing represents a reset for people more than learning and development. Today, we call these things reskilling and upskilling, but back in the day, I thought of them as training. Workforce training and development remain crucial, but now it’s all about remote education and distance learning.
As leaders, we need to consider how training has become an asset beyond changing the skill set of our workforce. For many, ingenuity has led to upskilling or reskilling in the face of being let go or even after being let go.
Redefining the Employee Experience
- Experience is king and leads to success if orchestrated properly.
- Putting employees first above all others, including customers, can lead to better customer experiences.
- Don’t waste your time reading reviews of the disgruntled. Focus on how you can drive outcomes with a workforce committed to your vision, mission, and culture.
Creating a Culture That Works
Culture is a double-edged sword. If healthy, it generates all sorts of creativity and innovation while unlocking more revenue. If toxic, it almost assuredly generates waste in talent costs, to the tune of $52 billion across the global economy every year.
Aside from the risk-reward nature of your organization’s culture, any leader appreciates one undeniable fact: transformation almost always begins with a culture change. Moreover, these culture changes are typically driven by a reset moment.
If you’ve always done it that way, it’s probably wrong.
Finding and Keeping Great Talent
Your biggest challenge isn’t technology, innovation, or even leadership. It’s about finding, hiring, and engaging the right talent to thrive now and in the future. Talent is an almost-spent natural resource. Imagine if oil reserves were fully depleted or natural gas deposits were totally exhausted.
This would be tantamount to being left without an energy source, and the same basic issue arises when considering the role talent plays in your organization.
Building Inclusive Workplaces
“Untapped” is the latest buzzword in the world of talent management. I hate jargon, but it fits here. Too many of an organization’s missed opportunities stem from a failure to recognize the potential of its current workforce or the applicant pool it uses to identify talent.
There is a term for the opportunity loss generated by overlooking talent from nontraditional sources. That term is “brain waste.” The US government has commissioned numerous evaluations of brain waste among immigrant populations alone.
The Human in Human Resources
HR is often viewed as a cost center with limited business acumen. Whether we have called for automating HR functions or putting them in areas overseen by others, HR continues to serve as an untapped human engine for the organization.
Specifically, we have seen during recent reset moments that HR is the true home of innovation within the modern organization. This is largely because HR leaders now have the responsibility to offer the kind of employee experience that attracts and retains top talent.
People, Profession, and Policy
Workplace policy is the unspoken influence in every one of our organizations. Workplace laws affect our costs and revenues. They drive how we view shareholder or stakeholder capitalism. They impact all facets of our organizations, from location to safety to pay.
Hell, they even play a role in what we do to recruit, retain, and offboard talent. Given their broad impact, we should always be cognizant of their role in our ecosystems. That said, we also have to ask ourselves one key question: Why do laws from an industrial era govern the entirety of a modern workplace more than a century later?
