10 Reasons Your Top Talent Will Leave You

Have you ever noticed leaders spend a lot of time talking about talent, only to make the same mistakes over and over again? Few things in business are as costly and disruptive as unexpected talent departures. With all the emphasis on leadership development, I always find it interesting so many companies seem to struggle with being able to retain their top talent. In today’s column, I’ll share some research, observations, and insights on how to stop the talent door from revolving.

Ask any CEO if they have a process for retaining and developing talent and they’ll quickly answer in the affirmative. They immediately launch into a series of soundbites about the quality of their talent initiatives, the number of high-potentials in the nine box, blah, blah, blah. As with most things in the corporate world, there is too much process built upon theory and not nearly enough practice built on experience.

When examining the talent at any organization look at the culture, not the rhetoric – look at the results, not the commentary about potential. Despite some of the delusional perspective in the corner office, when we interview their employees, here’s what they tell us:  

• More than 30% believe they’ll be working someplace else inside of 12 months.
• More than 40% don’t respect the person they report to.
• More than 50% say they have different values than their employer.
• More than 60% don’t feel their career goals are aligned with the plans their employers have for them.
• More than 70% don’t feel appreciated or valued by their employer.

So, for all those employers who have everything under control, you better start re-evaluating. There is an old saying that goes; “Employees don’t quit working for companies, they quit working for their bosses.” Regardless of tenure, position, title, etc., employees who voluntarily leave, generally do so out of some type of perceived disconnect with leadership.

Here’s the thing – employees who are challenged, engaged, valued, and rewarded (emotionally, intellectually & financially) rarely leave, and more importantly, they perform at very high levels. However if you miss any of these critical areas, it’s only a matter of time until they head for the elevator. Following are 10 reasons your talent will leave you – smart leaders don’t make these mistakes:

1. You Failed To Unleash Their Passions: Smart companies align employee passions with corporate pursuits. Human nature makes it very difficult to walk away from areas of passion. Fail to understand this and you’ll unknowingly be encouraging employees to seek their passions elsewhere.

2. You Failed To Challenge Their Intellect: Smart people don’t like to live in a dimly lit world of boredom. If you don’t challenge people’s minds, they’ll leave you for someone/someplace that will.1. You Failed To Unleash Their Passions: Smart companies align employee passions with corporate pursuits. Human nature makes it very difficult to walk away from areas of passion. Fail to understand this and you’ll unknowingly be encouraging employees to seek their passions elsewhere.

3. You Failed To Engage Their Creativity: Great talent is wired to improve, enhance, and add value. They are built to change and innovate. They NEED to contribute by putting their fingerprints on design. Smart leaders don’t place people in boxes – they free them from boxes. What’s the use in having a racehorse if you don’t let them run?

4. You Failed To Develop Their Skills:Leadership isn’t a destination – it’s a continuum. No matter how smart or talented a person is, there’s always room for growth, development, and continued maturation. If you place restrictions on a person’s ability to grow, they’ll leave you for someone who won’t.

5. You Failed To Give Them A Voice: Talented people have good thoughts, ideas, insights, and observations. If you don’t listen to them, I can guarantee you someone else will.

6. You Failed To Care: Sure, people come to work for a paycheck, but that’s not the only reason. In fact, many studies show it’s not even the most important reason. If you fail to care about people at a human level, at an emotional level, they’ll eventually leave you regardless of how much you pay them.

7. You Failed to Lead: Businesses don’t fail, products don’t fail, projects don’t fail, and teams don’t fail – leaders fail. The best testament to the value of leadership is what happens in its absence – very little. If you fail to lead, your talent will seek leadership elsewhere.

8. You Failed To Recognize Their Contributions: The best leaders don’t take credit – they give it. Failing to recognize the contributions of others is not only arrogant and disingenuous, but it’s as also just as good as asking them to leave.

9. You Failed To Increase Their Responsibility: You cannot confine talent – try to do so and you’ll either devolve into mediocrity, or force your talent seek more fertile ground. People will gladly accept a huge workload as long as an increase in responsibility comes along with the performance and execution of said workload.

10. You Failed To Keep Your Commitments: Promises made are worthless, but promises kept are invaluable. If you break trust with those you lead you will pay a very steep price. Leaders not accountable to their people, will eventually be held accountable by their people.

If leaders spent less time trying to retain people, and more time trying to understand them, care for them, invest in them, and lead them well, the retention thing would take care of itself. Thoughts?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemyatt/2012/12/13/10-reasons-your-top-talent-will-leave-you/

What's at stake for education in the fall elections?

With Election Day two months away, both of the major-party candidates for president have been largely silent about education policy. It's no surprise. President Obama and Governor Romney believe that their fortunes depend on whether people think the economy is getting better (or not), and how intrusive the government should be. Since most Americans have already made up their minds on those two things, the campaigns are targeting a sliver of swing voters in key states, trying to convince them that one of the candidates is likeable and the other is dangerous. Federal education policy is not a big enough wedge issue to move many swing voters this year. And yet this year's elections are crucial to much of what we do as educators. Billions of dollars will be spent in different ways for education based entirely on what happens in the November elections. What are the key races? Look very close to home. Nearly a million people (you read that correctly) will have their names on ballots this fall, and many of them care about education. They are our mayors, city councilors, school board members, and legislators of every type. We are a tremendously diverse democracy of more than 511,000 elected officials, representing voters in 3,033 counties, 14,561 school districts, and 35,949 cities and towns. Pause over those numbers for a moment and consider how education policy grows out of such varied places. The most recent (2009) numbers are impressive. State and local governments employ 6,260,224 in the education sector, including 86,417 professors and other instructors at public colleges and universities. By contrast, the federal Department of Education employs just 4,611 people nationwide, and less than six cents of every dollar spent on K-12 public education comes from the federal government. Six cents of every dollar. The rest comes from - and is largely controlled by - policymakers outside of Washington, D.C. In the K-12 world, there is a waning fiction that "No Child Left Behind"? (NCLB) dictated what teachers had to teach and hamstrung how they could do it. If that was true, it no longer is. Twenty-six of the 50 states have opted out of the formal NCLB targets since February 2012, and the remaining states will probably follow suit within a year. States - not the federal government - are taking the lead in deciding what grade-specific tests and targets are appropriate. Federal funds to higher education come in essentially three ways: loan subsidies and guarantees for tuition (mainly given to individual), aid to states that is then allocated to public colleges and universities (about $10 billion per year), and federal research support, primarily to large public and private universities (thank you, by the way). In two of these three categories - direct aid to states, and research dollars - federal money will be cut regardless who is elected in November. That is the reality that you should be preparing for. In Idaho, for example, Governor Butch Otter has already asked every state agency to brace for a 20 percent reduction of aid from Washington. Our long-term federal debt has become so burdensome that grants and aid will be cut, and it really does not matter which party controls Congress or the White House. Where does this leave you, and what can you do in the coming months? The numbers are fairly straight forward. Ninety-four percent of all money spent on K-12 education comes from state and local sources. More than 90 percent of all spending on public colleges and universities comes from state sources and endowments. The pull toward national standards imagined in NCLB has slackened, and federal money is getting harder to find. Since education policy is the work of state and local governments, then focus your energy there. If you have ever considered running for school board, then do it. If a local non-profit needs your help to redesign a curriculum, then pitch in. If you have never met your state representative, then make an appointment. If your mayor has never been in your lecture hall or your department, then send an invitation. There are more than 511,000 elected representatives in the United States. Are you one of them? Do you know someone who is? Democracy - like education itself - bubbles up through personal interactions at the individual level. Those are the kinds of relationships, and the kinds of elections, that need more of your attention between now and Election Day. Posted by David C. King

Ranking Web of World Universities

Since 2004, the Ranking Web (or Webometrics Ranking) is published twice a year (data is collected during the first weeks of January and July for being public at the end of both months), covering about 20,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide.

Click link below for more info:

www.webometrics.info/about_rank.html

Three Key Lessons from Going Green on Campus

The path to a cleaner, healthier campus begins in the classroom, office and dorm room. Across Harvard's 12-plus schools and administrative units we are building a culture of sustainability in partnership with our students, staff and faculty. We hope the innovative and creative approaches, programs and projects put into place by our community will serve as a replicable model for change at other large, complex institutions including universities, businesses and government. We also hope to inspire our students, future global contributors and leaders to incorporate sustainability into their lives and professional endeavors.

We have found that a commitment to creating a sustainable community directly ties into our academic and research mission and it also helps our bottom line. Energy efficiency measures and green building techniques are saving us millions in utility costs per year, often with a relatively short payback. Beyond fiscal savings there are other significant benefits such as improved operations efficiencies, improved productivity, health benefits and a more engaged, collaborative community. We also work to constantly evolve our efforts based on feedback from the community and the experience of our peer academic institutions and increasingly other sectors.

Said Harvard University President Drew Faust, "As a university we have a special responsibility to address complex global problems, like climate change and environmental sustainability, both with academics and research but also by turning the findings of that research into action."

As part of this effort we struggle with the same questions many others do. How do we keep people engaged? How do we ensure we're on the cutting edge? Several key lessons have emerged that we keep in mind and I'd like to share with others working on sustainability initiatives (and hear your ideas too):
Strong Leadership That Sets Clear, Aggressive Goals. Harvard's goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30% by 2016, including growth unified our schools and units, requiring them to focus on very specific energy reduction targets. This goal was adopted by our senior leadership--President Faust and all of our deans, which has aligned the university in pursuit of this goal. In addition, our comprehensive Green Building Standards set clear energy reduction, resource conservation and LEED targets for all construction and renovation projects. As a result, Harvard saves over $9 million annually just from the over 800 energy conservation measures that have already been implemented in order to reduce emissions and save energy.
Engage the Entire Community. The Harvard Office for Sustainability acts as a centralized catalyst for change, facilitating opportunities for students, faculty and staff to come together to learn from each other and share best practices that makes us all stronger. The office led a strategic planning process for Harvard's GHG reduction goal that engaged over 200 faculty, students and staff from every level of our organization. Every major policy change or initiative is reviewed and approved by representatives from all our schools and units, giving everyone a say in the ultimate outcome. Likewise, our Green Building Standards require that occupants be engaged earlier in project development so that future design considerations and decisions include their concerns, feedback and ideas. We also create training and provide information about sustainable building operations for occupants upon move-in. And Harvard's annual Green Carpet Awards ceremony was created in 2009 as an opportunity for our entire community to nominate, recognize and celebrate our "green heroes"--the students, staff and faculty who play an exemplary role in helping Harvard achieve its sustainability goals.
Tools and Resources That Spark Action. Harvard has focused on developing tools and resources to empower our community to take action. A four-tiered Green Office Program encourages employees to conserve resources by providing them with tips and guidelines in nine topic or impact locations. This program also ties to our Green Teams--individuals who adopt green practices in their departments and units. A Life Cycle Costing calculator was created with input from administrators and facilities across the university to allow schools and project managers to prioritize building projects that are economically viable and environmentally beneficial. Our website -- www.green.harvard.edu -- is a university-wide resource providing stories and profiles of best practices, including LEED case studies, so the community can learn from each other.
At the end of the day the foundation for all of our work is our people -- from President Faust and the deans, to the facility directors, building managers and project managers at all of our schools and on to the faculty, students, and staff who work, live and learn in our greener, healthier buildings. Without action and involvement from everyone in our community our progress would not be possible. And that is perhaps the most important lesson for us all to remember -- you are only as strong as your people and your success depends on the level to which you empower and engage your entire community.
by Heather Henriksen, Director, Harvard Office for Sustainability

Prediction for 2012: Continued U.S. Decline in Education

About this time a year ago, Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, lamented the nation’s lackluster performance results in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study. Every three years, PISA measures reading, math, and scientific literacy among 15-year-old students around the world. According to Duncan, PISA “is fast becoming the measuring rod by which countries track trends in national performance and assess college and career-readiness of students as they near the end of their compulsory education and prepare to participate in the global economy.”

Duncan eagerly awaited the results, but was sorely disappointed when they came in. It turns out that the U.S. is not among any of the top performing countries in any subject areas tested by PISA. U.S. students lag behind kids in Canada, Finland, South Korea, Estonia, Japan, Australia, Singapore, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, and other countries. In reading, a category where U.S. students performed their best, they are tied with Poland (insert Polish joke here). The U.S. reading scores are closer to those of Latvia and Slovenia than neighboring Canada, where their students are better readers and more adept in math and science. That data is quite revealing: Students in the U.S. are less capable in accessing and retrieving data than those in some developing countries, and U.S. students struggle in interpreting and integrating information.

Some commentators immediately suggested that socio-economics pulled down the U.S. scores. In other words, poor kids from under-performing schools created an imbalance, which hurt the overall U.S. outcome. Some of this is racialized (i.e. pundits claim “poor black kids can’t read well and under-perform in math and science”). In part, that’s true, though clearly such generalities are over-inclusive and ignore what contributes to low student performance. Social promotion, including graduating students from high school without a 6th grade reading capacity, moving students along because they’re too old to be in elementary or middle school, high rates of mobility, and low verbal capacity upon entering first grade, are among the pitfalls and challenges in public education that undermine student success as well as the academic health of school districts. Typically there’s the debate as to who’s at fault—parents or teachers. Blame can be leveled at both groups, but let’s not overlook politicians who want to cut funding for education.

That said, pundits who blame poor, black public-school kids for these results miss the mark. Results from a different study conducted by an independent research firm debunk the notion that it’s the U.S. poor (alone) who drag down education. The 2009 Raytheon study sheds some insight on student behavior. For example, “seventy‐two percent of U.S. middle school students spend more than three hours each day outside of school in front of a TV, mobile phone or computer screen rather than doing homework or other academic‐related activities.” The study noted, “by contrast, just 10 percent of students spend the same amount of time on their homework each day, and 67 percent spend less than one hour on their math homework.”

Indeed, nearly 30 percent of the students surveyed could not name a career that requires math skills. This was not an inner-city survey. This is the state of “middle” America.

The US is in an academic crisis, but parents and their children don’t seem to know this. US students had more self-confidence in their knowledge and academic skills than nearly all other students in all the other countries included in the PISA study (about 64 nations and territories). The inflated notion of self is despite the fact that more U.S. students performed at a level “considered to be below the baseline level of reading proficiency needed to participate effectively and productively in life” than at the highest level. Urgent change is needed, but the problems will likely persist.

Indeed, what we witness in high-school performance now seeps into collegiate and graduate school aptitude and attitude. For example, universities seem as ill-equipped to address these issues as K-12 schools. Here, I’m not speaking of providing academic support centers. The students at the very bottom of the class likely realize their struggles with reading and math proficiency. It’s the middle group that poses the biggest challenge, particularly as they have been nurtured to believe that they are the best and the brightest.

This toxic mixture of overconfidence and under-performance has contributed to “limited learning” at college, according to Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. In their book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the authors found that “in the first two years of school, 45 percent of college students had no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing.”

On examination, it becomes clear that American students don’t buckle up when coming to college; instead, poor study habits follow—or perhaps worsen post-high school. In the Arum and Roksa study of more than 2,300 students, they found that U.S. students study about 12 hours per week, which is less than half of the hours college students devoted to studying in 1961. Graduate and professional schools are headed in the same direction, trading high academic standards and sometimes uncomfortable truths for appeasing students who pay high tuition.



This entry was posted in Higher Education, teaching, Uncategorized.

An SEO Playbook for 2012

http://searchengineland.com/an-seo-playbook-for-2012-103906

Search Engine Optimization is growing up. I am not ready to say the Wild West SEO days are completely eradicated, but in 2011 good search engine optimization is less about trickery and more about engaging content and audience development than ever before.

Over the years, quality optimizers have become more prone to avoid technical tricks like using CSS image replacement to inject keyword text or controlling the flow of PageRank by hiding links from search engines.

Search engines keep getting better at crawling and indexing. If you are unwilling to burn your website or risk your career, you follow the search engines’ terms of service.

During 2011 the conservative attitude toward code crossed chasm to apply to content. For years, websites churned-out poorly written, generic articles in the name of long-tail keyword optimization. It worked so well some people turned crappy content into startups.

Now, thanks to Panda, Google’s site-wide penalty for having too much low quality content, people are asking why anyone would put pages on a website that no one wants to read, share or link to? Without taking potshots at the past, most of those articles look juvenile and antiquated.

Made in Japan went from signifying cheap to marvelous. Made for the Web is growing-up too. It is this evolution which guides my SEO highlights for 2012. I separate things to keep in mind by code, design and content.

Code – Keep It Simple
While Google likes to tell us they are very good at crawling and understanding imperfect code, I prefer to assume search engines are dumb and help them every way I can. Simple code is honest code. It’s also easy to parse and analyze. Just because you can AJAX-up a page with accordions and fly-outs does not mean you should. The more code on a page, the more things that can go wrong from spider access to browser compatibility.

Follow standards and get as close to validated markup as reasonably possible. Make it easy for search engines to spider your site. Validating HTML and CSS does not automagically raise your rankings, but it will prevent crawl errors.

At the same time, don’t insist on validation since some perfectly good code will never validate. Follow search engine recommendations to Make AJAX, XML and Other Code Crawl able.

Make your CSS class and ID names obvious, especially for section div tags. Again, Google tells us they have gotten good at identifying headers, sidebars and footers. Part of that is almost assuredly knowing the most common div names.

Make it easy on Google and Bing by naming your header div header.
Name the CSS ID of your right sidebar div right-sidebar.
Why would you name a CSS Class xbr_001 when you can name it navigation? At the very least, it will make life a lot easier on your SEO team. They have enough work without the need to translate ambiguous naming structures.

Reserve h# tags for outlining principal content. I am amazed at the number of big brand websites that still use h# tags for font design. Tell your designers that h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6 are off-limits and reserved for content writers and editors.

The only exception to this should be if your content management system uses h1 tags to create a proper headline. Embargo h# tags out of your headers, navigation, sidebars and footers too. They don’t belong there.

Web Design – Less Navigation Is More
Look at the Zen like efficiency of any Apple product. Steve Jobs was ruthless about eliminating the unnecessary and achieving clean Bauhaus efficiency.

By contrast, too many websites, especially enterprise sites, try to be all things to all people. Their administrators or managers fear they might miss out on a conversion for lack of a link.

Websites should have clean vertical internal linking. Every page should not link to every page. You do not need a site-wide menu three levels deep. As long as people feel that they are progressing toward their goal or the useful information they seek, they will click on two, three or four links to get there.

Look at your website analytics. Which pages receive the fewest visits? Are any in your navigation? If no one uses a link, why does it to be there?

A website’s most widely visited pages tend to be close to the homepage. Review your categories and sub-categories. Can you eliminate whole categories by merging or reassigning content? For example, does the management team need its own category or can you move it into the About section?

This is not just about eliminating distraction. It is a way to increase the internal flow of authority (PageRank, link juice, etc.) to SEO hub pages.

Content – Engagement & Agility
Emphasize Community and Conversation. If your business depends on the Internet and you have the budget to hire one more person, consider employing a community evangelist. High rankings require authority. Authority comes from off-site links and, to an extent, brand mentions.

Earning enough links to make a dent in your SEO requires a continuous stream of link worthy content combined with forging and fostering relationships with people who create links or influence lots of others through online conversation. This requires a large commitment of time to work with writers and designers and to network. Even when decentralized, this rarely works without a strong empowered leader.

Get out of the sales funnel. The people you want to buy your products or services are not going to blog about your company or mention it on Twitter. More likely, they are peers.

A good exercise to undertake is ask each employee, if they could pick one professional conference to attend, what would it be? Then look for the session speakers on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Find which ones are active online and gauge their influence. Are people in your company qualified to write authoritatively about these topics or speak at conferences?

This is how to find content topics for the post-Panda Web, things people want to converse about and link to. For example, if you have a cutting-edge API team, an API development blog could be the key to higher domain authority.

Understand Social Technographics. It will help you to find influencers and create content that people will want to link to and talk about.

Embrace Agility

Realign your content generation and approval process so you can create near-daily web content and, if necessary, respond publically to something within an hour.

With Query Deserves Freshness, trending topics, news search and simply because of how social media conversations come and go, agility is important for getting noticed and getting links.

Update Your Content

If your website has older articles that read like Wikipedia or a hardcover World Book Encyclopedia, swap out old content for new. In the future, Panda will not get leaner, it will get meaner. If you have reason to worry, start fixing it now. Do not wait and hope Panda will not see your low quality content. I want to be very clear here:

If you have decent quality content that provides real value, keep it whether it is SEO optimized or not. Yes, get to work optimizing older content doing things like selecting hub pages, optimizing text and cross-linking. But do not delete your old content.
If you have content that seems overtly advertorial, is cheesy or reads robotic because it is so stuffed with keywords, begin the process of writing one-for-one replacements and update your old content over time. For the old-time SEOs out there, this brings new meaning to a page a day.
If you have been hit by Panda already, I suggest removing your poor quality content, set-up 301 redirects to salvage the link authority, then begin rebuilding with high quality, link worthy content. Panda is a site-wide penalty. It is not going to go away until the offending content is removed or replaced.
Those are my 2012 SEO playbook highlights. In the past, content creation and link building were too separated. We had writers covering every long-tail key phrase possible while, in another room, link ninjas emailed and telephoned soliciting for individual links.

That model is becoming less and less sustainable. The Web is too big. Too many people contribute content. Social media offers an entirely new world of context. Today, SEO means finding an audience you can connect with, become a part of the community, give them insanely awesome content and reciprocate. This is the new SEO arms race.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Entries
SEOnomics: A New Way Of Thinking About SEO For Business
Employing Microformats & Structured Data For Enhanced Search Engine Visibility
From Garbage To Gourmet: Fixing SEO Content Strategies
Schema.org: Google, Bing & Yahoo Unite To Make Search Listings Richer Through Structured Data

Private equity still strong, despite market challenges

Despite widespread pessimism over the global economic outlook, almost a quarter of private equity investors believe private equity has become more attractive in light of recent volatility in financial markets.

A further 64 per cent of investors do not view private equity any differently as a result of the current financial climate and 14 per cent find it less attractive, Preqin research has found.

Many investors feel that private equity has become increasingly attractive as public markets have become more volatile, with some identifying opportunities in times of economic distress and others planning to look to emerging markets for new investments.

More than three-quarters, 76 per cent, of a sample of 300 investors interviewed in October and November 2011 plan to make new fund commitments over the coming 12 months, while 92 per cent expect to maintain or increase their allocations over the longer term, further illustrating their confidence in the asset class. Just 8% intend to decrease their exposure to private equity over the next three to five years.

Emma Dineen, manager – private equity investor data, said, “The global financial crisis undoubtedly prompted many LPs to re-evaluate their private equity strategies. Many have become more cautious and selective when choosing fund managers to invest with. However, despite recent volatility in the wider financial markets, investors generally remain positive about the private equity asset class, and many believe that there are good investment opportunities ahead.

“While investor appetite is there, the crowded fundraising market means that investors are well positioned to be selective about the funds they choose to commit to, so the challenge remains for fund managers to market their funds in the best possible way and to ensure that they target the right investors if they are to enjoy success in this competitive market,” she added.
http://www.altassets.net/knowledge-bank/leading-edge/private-equity-still-strong-despite-market-challenges.html