Anyone who has the (mis?)fortune to work with me knows that I hold myself to a high standard. I absolutely hate disappointing people, and I take criticism quite seriously. My superiors can take this in two ways: They can just hope that I will find the correct resources on my own to fix my own flaws, or what I perceive to be my flaws; or they can use this drive and give me resources/training to perfect my flaws.You get what you give us
I am not the only Millennial in the workplace. I might be more critical of myself than others, and there are definitely Millennials out there who think they have all of the answers. What we do have in common is:
a) we do not have all of the answers
b) unless someone helps us find the answers, they aren’t going to magically appear in front of us.
We all know that taking a shot in the dark relies on luck to hit the correct target. Expecting me to find the right resources to help improve my work on my own is going to produce the same results as taking a shot in the dark.
Maps and guidebooks
Mentorship is like giving someone a map and a guidebook; you show starting and end points. You point out all of the cute cafes, museums, and the best hotels. You share helpful reviews on places and tips to avoid traffic.
At the same time, you let the person you are sharing these tools with choose the path that works best for them. You might dog-ear a few pages or even pencil in a route, but you allow them to make decisions based on these tools and your advice.
Direction, not dictatorship
You see, mentorship does not equate dictatorship. It is a relationship built on sharing learned lessons, fears and concerns, and a genuine drive to create the best employee.
How can you have a team of fantastic employees unless you give them the tools to be the best possible versions of themselves?
Mapping out Millennial mentorship needs
I have been fortunate enough to work largely in management roles after securing my undergraduate degree. I’ve always been a problem-solver and a people-lover. I can say that I’ve been a coordinator, a manager, and a director. I’ve managed large teams and small teams. If I have my way, mentorship will always be a major component in my future jobs. Having mentored Millennials and knowing what I desperately want in my employment experiences, I’ve made a list (a guide, if you will):
- No one likes feeling lost. Giving maps and guides to projects includes making it clear that asking for directions is not a sign of weakness, but of strength.
- If they look lost, they are probably lost. Send them a compass and if they still can’t find north, gently nudge them in the right direction.
- Show your team your own wrong turns and ask them to help give you directions in your journey.
- “Fatigue Kills” is a sign found on any highway. It’s true. Take breaks from the task of getting from point A to B by enjoying the scenery. Get to know your team. Take the time to celebrate their differences and learn their tricks.
- Treat each person like a different trip. You wouldn’t give someone who hates trains a route that only involves trains. You are only truly mentoring when you building up each person individually and uniquely.
- Make the trip. You can’t complain about not seeing the world if you don’t ever leave your house. You cannot complain about having mediocre employees if you haven’t put the effort to cultivate the best in them.
- Know when to turn around. It’s always hard to see that someone is getting roadblock after roadblock and the detours are not working.
We’re so used to planning long journeys. When you expected a person to stay in a company for 40 years, mentorship was a long trip. You could cultivate the best in employees because the timeframe and the amount of distance to cover could grow and expand over decades. With contracts lasting from a few months to a couple of years, mentorship means thinking about small day trips and giving guides to help in their overall journey. But, as we all know, even the smallest of trips needs direction to be successful.
For more HR best practices, see 6 Managing Skills That Companies Take for Granted.
This post originated at ARCOMPANY
The post Give Me a Guidebook and a Map: Mentorship and Millennials appeared first on Millennial CEO.
Photo credit: Guide Book via photopin(license).
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The financial services industry, especially capital markets, must become digital or it will lose to innovators, says a new report from TABB Group.
“By our estimation (and with very few exceptions), banking and capital markets have remained largely impervious to the digital revolution,” writes Paul Rowady, director of data and analytics research, in a July report “Digitized Markets: Opening the Door on Human Latency.”
“Financial services – and most conspicuously, the institutional capital markets segment – has been notable for its perceived attachment to all things analog…” he added, comparing it — unfavorably — to publishing and music.
He points to three areas where technical disruption is threatening incumbents — payments, lending, and investment advisory. A second driver is regulation, which is pressing financial firms to do more with less.
Rowady sets the bar high, with high-frequency trading as his example.
“By our estimation, high frequency trading (HFT) is the optimal – and perhaps one of the only – example where a market-facing firm achieved an order-of-magnitude, revolutionary outcome relative to historical precedent…On a revenue-per-employee (RPE) basis – and at the height of HFT strategy profitability – this translated into operating leverage of more than $ 3 million in gross revenue per year per employee or more.” By comparison, a sample of ten Tier-1 players showed an RPE of approximately $ 500,000.
Larry Tabb, founder and CEO of the TABB Group, said the industry is challenged as more and more information is collected and analyzed.
“Folks are trying to create data sets out of everything and signals out of everything, including unstructured information,” he said.
“Increasingly, as you wind up with the Internet of Things digitizing more and more stuff, you wind up with more and more data sets and signals to analyze. It’s not just about HFT, it is really about trying to find, clean, aggregate, analyze, and put into context all sort of different streams of information,” he added.
“I think virtually every area will increasingly be as digitized as HFT is. Money managers are becoming very, very quantitative — looking at and trying to understand what are the driving forces that influence a stock price and what effects does the supply chain have.”
The TABB study does not include two areas of digitalization in capital markets — index funds and ETFs, both of which operate largely free of human intervention.
A new paper, “Command Centres of the Asset Management Industry,” by Duncan MacDonald-Korth and Professor Dariusz Wojcik, of Oxford, notes that while traditional asset management firms are mostly in big cities where they can easily meet with clients, the top ten ETFs are more scattered — in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Chicago, as well as New York and Boston.
“They [ETFs] differ from the traditional asset management model in how they are bought, sold, and distributed,” the paper notes. “Unlike the traditional model, ETF products can be bought and sold entirely digitally, with no need for face to face interaction, hence their name of ‘exchange-traded products’… Because the funds are managed digitally and take little work to set up, startup costs and market penetration are significantly easier to achieve for young firms… the success of ETFs, their low-cost operation, and their ability to be managed outside of financial centers has had, and will continue to have, important effects on the geographic concentration of the Asset Management industry.”
(The paper will be available this autumn from the Social Science Research Network and published next year in the Journal of Economic Geography.)
Rowady expects the digitization of finance will require more experts in parallel programming, human-computer interface design, user-experience design, process redesign, collaborative project management, and data science. Since many of these skills will be obtained through contractors, financial services will also need to develop better supply chain management skills.
Analytics will be important, he added, because existing systems often have problems with bottlenecks at their core. The finance industry needs to automate more of the processes, from analytics to execution, to reduce costs.
“TABB Group recently estimated that the human capital component of the total cost of ownership (TCO) for financial market participants is about 76 percent, or over 3x the combined TCO of hardware, software and data.”
Want more on how our increasingly digital economy is changing the way business runs? See Networks that drive net worth.
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What are the hot trends in HR technology? It’s a rhetorical question; put another way, what aren’t the trends? HR technology in itself, having profoundly changed the game, is the hot trend: It’s heated up our field in ways that allow us to leverage talent on an entirely different level, regardless of the size or scope of an organization and irrespective of the end goals, from short-term to future-casting.
We’ll see further evidence of just how far we’ve come in October, when the HR Technology Conference and Exposition descends on Las Vegas. Once, we might have all discussed the concept of tech for HR. Now the conference will witness the rollout of out new HR tech products by the 60-fold. There is no more etcetera, just a shared understanding in just how critical tech is in terms of pushing the boundaries. HR’s best practices now include a far larger sense of infinite functions. And a key difference now is that we’re not future converts to this brave new world, we’re the creators and the consumers.
If I had to pick them, here are the top four hottest trends:
Cloud computing: expanding innovation
Shifting information and HR applications to the cloud has changed our perspective in myriad ways, allowing us increased flexibility, far greater innovation and agility, the opportunity to consolidate and better control costs via a focused management system, and more. It’s a practical paradigm shift with an ambitiously border-free frontier. It prompts a far more inclusive sense of intelligence about the world of work.
Big Data: enabling objectivity
We’re using Big Data to attain a new objectivity in terms of talent management, redefining the questions we ask ourselves — and the answers we can create. Tapping into a singular aggregate that can be parsed in endless directions and variations enables us to replace that old-fashioned amorphous hunch with a far more objective, full-spectrum view. It’s the sheer scale that pushes us into that objectivity — and pushes innovations to handle it more precisely, more fluidly.
Predictive analytics: pushing the future
Trending: Our graduation from smoke and mirrors to mathematically based future-casting. What keeps the human factor front and center is combining this new objectivity with a very real sense of human behavior and patterns: We can make decisions based on a broad range of predictors, fill gaps before they happen, and maintain fluidity in the workplace and productivity as well.
Best-of-breed and integrated software: customizing tasks without losing options
Whatever the particular merits of best-of-breed versus integrated software in talent management, I think the debate is a bit too candy-shop at this point. Here the trend needs to hew a more intentional course of convergence rather than further separation (software innovators, take note). Whether a best-of-breed spectrum or an integrated application, the key is being able to focus and function. That’s the grand takeaway of this shift: accounting or recruiting, succession planning or training, the tools are about talent and about people, not about numbers.
We can’t assume that just because we’ve now innovated our way into infinity that an agile wisdom is built in. Nor can we assume the bells and whistles are intelligent enough to know our best intentions. And I haven’t even mentioned mobile / social and readiness. Whatever we do, it must live on mobile and social or it’s overlooking a substantial part of the workforce — not to mention how we work these days.
In terms of readiness, when we adopt HR tech may seem to be related to size. It’s easier to consider massive changes on a smaller scale, but that’s a fallacy. Actionable insights, pipeline building, whatever, it all needs to be a shift across the board, and another trend is going to be that we change the very status quo of talent management.
Already, a 2014 survey of some 270 companies by PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that 70% of companies surveyed with HR and payroll in the cloud had fewer than 5,000 employees — small and medium scale is leading the shift. But 57% of larger companies with more than 5,000 employees are already enabling performance management with cloud-based software, and 32% of all companies were planning on shifting recruiting strategies to the cloud by 2016. And companies of extreme size and scale are already leveraging the tech power of serious (and social) recruiting capabilities to source the best and brightest.
We all know the old homily: The future is now. Modern organizations thrive on what HR tech is becoming; HR tech’s trajectory depends on being able to respond and meet the demands we’re just learning to shape. So long as we can keep the human factor involved, as ubiquitous as tech is becoming, we’ll be golden. Shine on.
Want more on how HR is changing the way business works? See The Future of Human Resources.
Photo Credit: Big Stock Images
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Digital disruptors are not only changing targeted 
industries, they’re also sending ripple effects of innovation throughout the world. “Digital technologies are doing for human brainpower what the steam engine and related technologies did for human muscle power during the Industrial Revolution,” says IT researcher and author Andrew McAfee in a Harvard Business Review interview.
Most companies believe they are already reinventing their businesses through digital transformation. In a survey conducted by Altimeter Group last year, 88% of executives said as much. Yet most companies lack the basics for a successful transformation. Seventy-five percent of those surveyed by Altimeter Group admitted major strategic gaps, such as leaving the role of the customer out of their digital transformation strategy.
The four pressure points
Four inescapable trends are creating the pressures that shape today’s digital transformation:
1. The empowered customer
Whether your customers are Generation Z consumers or multi-national conglomerates, they all share one vitally important characteristic: each demands to be treated as a unique segment of one. You have no choice but to meet that expectation. Digital and mobile technologies mean that no matter where your customers are, your competition is always one tap away. Enterprises must be capable of delivering rich, real-time interactions and intelligently personalized products and services to each distinct customer, and do so efficiently at scale.
2. Competitive and regulatory pressures
Transparency is a necessary part of business today, and that means competitors and regulators alike can dissect any business process. Staying ahead of the former and meeting the standards of the latter requires operational excellence and accountability at every step in the value cycle. To keep pace, enterprises must develop a varied arsenal of low-touch and automated processes that can make intelligent business decisions based on customer demand and real-time market conditions.
3. Globalization
More businesses today must be prepared to go global in order to remain relevant. Expanding into new markets can no longer be done effectively with costly, infrastructure-heavy international buildouts. Enterprises need a pay-as-you-go strategy with scalable capacity, which can be adjusted rapidly to meet market conditions in any region.
4. Technological progress
The tide of innovations and discoveries is unrelenting. Businesses must be agile enough to quickly adopt new strategies, and be steered by insightful, knowledgeable leadership that can sort winning inventions from dead-end novelties.
What a flexible digitized core can do
Withstanding these four inescapable pressures requires a flexible digitized core at the heart of every organization — one that can reinvent business processes not just every generation, but every day, if necessary. A flexible core, ready for the demands of today’s disruption, can be identified by three key characteristics: efficiency, effectiveness, and agility.
A digitized core increases efficiency by automating processes and distributing responsibility for customer insights across an intelligent business network. Consider how 3D printing is completely reinventing the concept of inventory. The digitized core makes it possible to move manufacturing much closer to the time and place of purchase.
The digitized core increases effectiveness by converting signals in business data into tangible action. That can mean anything from real-time demand forecasting that sends new production orders automatically, to intelligent financing that takes full advantage of global capital markets. A digitized core brings Big Data down to the size and scale needed to deliver valuable insights for everyday business practitioners. Since every enterprise must be ready to create value from data, the digital core itself must be rooted in data.
Finally, the digitized core increases enterprise agility by enhancing every stakeholder’s understanding of the entire business, elevating each employee’s view of the organization. This can empower sales to close deals with higher margin, and R&D to focus on projects with the greatest market potential.
Think like a startup
Today’s enterprises must be agile in order to survive. That means taking advantage of digital opportunities at every turn, even if it flies in the face of established convention. For instance, augmented reality can deliver a virtual showroom or guided maintenance instructions directly to a client site. If that sounds like something only a startup would do, that is not far from the truth. Digital transformation means every business must think and act like a venture capitalist, and a digital core is the surest way to adapt to these modern realities.
Even the most storied enterprises must be able to move with alacrity. “In a world of more data and less certainty, companies have to make decisions and respond to disrupters all the earlier and the more decisively,” McKinsey warns. Without a modern digitized core, even competing on the edges of a market will no longer be an option, as disruption squeezes out those with processes to inflexible to adapt. With a digitized core, an enterprise can disrupt an industry from the inside out.
In future posts, we will explain how to design a digital transformation and how to put that plan into action. For a sneak preview, take a look at how the digital business foundation of SAP S/4HANA is already delivering results.
Learn more how SAP can transform your digitized core and follow me via @SDenecken.
This story originally appeared on SAP Business Trends.
Photo: Shutterstock
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society. One of the most recent, and pervasive, changes is the rise of the Internet of Things – the web of connections linking the myriad physical objects and digital systems that surround us. The result is a massive set of real-time information designed to help people make better, more informed decisions on everything from how to bundle and sell more products to finding the best intercity parking spot to saving energy at home.
However, it’s easy to get bogged down in the size and complexity of this new information set. If businesses are to take advantage of its power and, just as important, serve their customers using it, they must focus on innovation. But that’s easier said than done, especially when they’re dealing with overly complex business systems and processes.
In a Harvard Business Review study, sponsored by SAP, 60% of business managers reported that complexity increased their operational costs by at least 11%. Plus, the average business spends two-thirds of its IT budget only maintaining current systems, which can encompass hundreds or even thousands of applications.
Just maintaining such a complex status quo leaves little time, energy, or resources for innovation. What if those resources could be freed up? Could IT and lines of business come together and dream? What new business models could you adapt to grow the company? Which product lines or services have growth potential? How can you support new channels, service levels, or geographical expansion? What if you could simplify inherent complexities, often rooted in IT, and apply efforts toward re-imagining your business?
Tackling business and IT complexity
To address such challenges and help enterprises simplify in today’s digital economy, businesses are creating value across industries by generating instant insight from real-time connections to Big Data, the Internet of
future of business – Digitalist Magazine
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