13 Interview Questions Asked By Successful Business Leaders [Infographic]
What sorts of questions do senior executives like to ask job candidates?
An infographic (below) from Resume.io covers 13 favorites of successful business leaders such as Elon Musk of Tesla and Sara Blakely of Spanks.
The infographic explores each of the questions and delves into why executives like to ask it.
It also provides advice on how to answer each interview question.
Check out the infographic:
What sorts of questions do senior executives like to ask job candidates?
An infographic (below) from Resume.io covers 13 favorites of successful business leaders such as Elon Musk of Tesla and Sara Blakely of Spanks.
The infographic explores each of the questions and delves into why executives like to ask it.
It also provides advice on how to answer each interview question.
Check out the infographic:
12 creative yet effective strategies to retain employees
Importance of retaining employees
Many employers are starting to learn that employee retention is a better outcome in the long run instead of constantly having to screen and hire new job seekers. For obvious reasons, employee retention helps in cost reduction. Companies spend millions of dollars in finding, recruiting, onboarding, and training new hires yearly. Costs for advertising, interviewing, and training expenses can instead be used in improving other aspects of the business such as reskilling and upskilling current employees, better facilities, and more benefits to offer to the workforce.
Having a constant turnover of employees can negatively affect the morale and engagement of the workforce. Employees who stay with the company constantly lose work connections which could see them shouldering more work and responsibilities – leading to possible burnouts and lower productivity rates.
This then leads to lower output quality, poor customer loyalty, and a decrease in company profit. When employees feel uncared for and continually see their colleagues leave for better offers, it pushes them even more to follow suit in quitting which could be the possible reason why a company will fail.
Read more: Gen Z: How to attract the next generation of employees
12 creative and effective strategies to retain employees
HR leaders should take the lead in handling employee retention levels of the organization. in order to find the right method and strategies that fit the company, they should be able to understand the needs of employees and try different methods to satisfy those needs.
What To Do When the Devil Wears [Your Brand]
Consumers select brands they regard as matches to their self-image, and a positive public role model associated with your brand helps facilitate this comparison. Once consumers form adverse associations with your brand, this may result in decreased revenue and other financial harm. The more this happens, or the longer it continues unaddressed, the greater the threat that consumers will form a negative association between your brand and a controversial figure.
Managers who find themselves in a similar situation must ask the following three questions: What are the risks from such an incident? What can we do to counteract the criticism? What (if any) long-term consequences have brands suffered because of similar circumstances?
Protecting a brand’s equity and value should be one of an executive’s key responsibilities. Companies buy protection software and use blacklists to stop questionable publishers and endorsers from negatively portraying their brand, for example. But what happens when the brand is displayed unfavorably in an environment that the marketer can’t control?
This is exactly what happened to Italian brand Loro Piana — part of the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH — on March 18, 2022. During a rally televised on Russian state TV celebrating Russia’s unpopular and tagic invasion of Ukraine, president Vladimir Putin wore a $14,000 Loro Piana parka. The parka was identified by public observers and Loro Piana was heavily criticized on social media for not denouncing Putin soon enough.
Climate-related disclosure annually costs companies $677,000 on average
Dive Brief:
- Companies annually pay on average $677,000 for reporting on the risks from climate change, according to results of a study released as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) pushes forward with a proposal to require detailed climate-related disclosures.
- The study includes two cost categories excluded in SEC calculations and so exceeds the agency’s average annual cost estimate of $530,000. Absent the two categories, the average annual cost for a company is $533,000, according to SustainAbility Institute at ERM, which conducted the study.
- The study “helps clarify where the market is already placing its climate disclosure bets,” according to Isabel Munilla, director of U.S. financial regulation at Ceres, which commissioned the survey. “The study’s quantitative estimates of investor status quo costs illuminate the disclosure reality on which SEC rules are being built."
Dive Insight:
SEC Chair Gary Gensler in March released an agency proposal that companies follow detailed rules for reporting on climate risk, asserting that businesses and investors will benefit from clear, uniform disclosures on the costs from global warming.
Under the proposal, companies would need to describe on Form 10-K their governance and strategy toward climate risk and their plan to achieve any targets they’ve set for curbing such risk.
Companies would also be required to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, either from their facilities or through their energy purchases, and obtain independent attestation of their data and estimates. The proposal is subject to a public comment period ending June 17.
Read the original article from CFO DIve
The Top Challenges to Providing an Exceptional B2B Customer Experience
B2B marketing, sales, and customer success professionals say a lack of communication among their teams is the biggest barrier to providing an exceptional customer experience, according to recent research from The Pedowitz Group and Ascend2.
The report was based on data from a survey conducted in March 2022 among 507 marketing, sales, and customer success professionals in the US who work for B2B firms.
Respondents across Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success say a lack of communication among teams is the top challenge they face in providing an exceptional customer experience.
Marketers are more likely than the other groups to say that inadequate/inaccurate data is a top challenge to providing an exceptional experience, salespeople are more likely to say a lack of a unified view of the customer is a top challenge, and customer success professionals are more likely to say that ineffective leadership is a top challenge.
Marketers and salespeople say the top priority for improving communication should be alignment among teams. Customer success professionals say better use of technology should be the top priority for improving communication.
Some 69% of respondents say their firm is currently working towards better aligning its Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams.
About the research: The report was based on data from a survey conducted in March.
Read the original article from Marketing Prof
Autonomy is the future of supply chain
Over the past few years, we have experienced an unprecedented time, with a steady increase in supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic, geopolitical events and the effects of climate change. All of these events have changed enterprise expectations for supply chains. According to Gartner research, nearly 80% of organizations expect supply chains must be able to make faster, more accurate and consistent decisions in real-time, in such an increasingly volatile and fast-evolving market.
With this expectation in mind, CSCOs need to design a new supply chain operating model that is geared around real-time data availability and people enablement for better decision making. Digitalization is the critical enabler, not only because it helps automate tasks originally requiring some form of human judgment or action. Technology also helps unleash employees’ trapped talent by freeing up their time from nonvalue-added tasks and by augmenting their decision-making capability.
These steps are already being taken by leading supply chains. For example, Intel’s autonomous planning uses machine learning (ML) to analyze results from the planning engine and explain plan changes cycle over cycle, including what drove particular changes. With this knowledge, it can identify the need for a new plan and then start an autorun. If the scenario meets all stated goals, it can autonomously publish it as the plan of record for the company. It’s also able to create a knowledge base that gets stronger over time by accumulating supply chain knowledge and expertise.
Read the original article from SCMR
The Best Strategies Don’t Just Take a Long View. They Take a Broad View.
Leaders have long been told that to think strategically means taking the long view and focusing on where they’re going. Contemporary tools such as the three-horizons framework reflect this focus. But today, in an ever more interconnected and fast-paced world, leaders have to develop strategies that take into account not only the long view but also the broad view, which encompasses the full spectrum of opportunities and threats that are emerging on all sides.
The shift to a broad view of strategy has three key implications for leaders. First, it means they have to focus on anticipating contextual changes that might significantly and rapidly reshape the business environment, and it means they have to work with others to co-create value as they do that. Second, it means they have to imagine different time horizons and use them not just to make plans for the future but also to gain broader perspectives on the present. And third, it means they need to prepare themselves to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances, by constantly working on their agility and creating new options for themselves.
In the strategy work we have done with businesses and government organizations, including via the World Economic Forum and the Oxford Scenarios Programme, we’ve focused on the growing importance of the broad view — and we’ve learned that to properly design and execute it, leaders need to change the focus of their thinking in three fundamental ways.
Read the original article here
How Well Do B2B Firms Handle Routing Sales Leads?
Most B2B professionals say their organization sometimes assigns sales leads to the wrong person, according to recent research from Lean Data, Sales Hacker, Heinz Marketing, and Outreach.
The report was based on data from a survey conducted in December 2021 among 1,732 sales, marketing, and operations professionals at B2B firms.
Some 60% of respondents say leads are sometimes assigned to the wrong owner at their company, 5% say they are assigned to the wrong owner about half the time, and 2% say they are assigned to the wrong owner most of the time.
Only 32% of B2B professionals say leads are never assigned to the wrong owner at their company.
Two-thirds of respondents say they are happy with the process they have in place for matching leads to accounts, whereas a quarter say they are able to match leads to accounts but the process is slow and/or error prone.
Some 30% of respondents say that leads at their firm are manually routed by Sales or Operations, 25% say routing is handled by a marketing automation platform, and 25% say they have native assignment rules in their CRM.
Read the original article from Marketing Prof
It’s Time to Give Companies Standalone Climate Ratings
Investors are increasingly using ESG ratings for their investment decisions. But we need to assign companies a stand-alone rating focused on climate risk that’s distinct from the ESG rating system. Such a climate-specific rating can distill complex information regarding a company’s carbon footprint and climate risk into an intuitive, user-friendly format, while avoiding the flaws that currently mar ESG ratings. The “super-wicked” problem of climate change is so urgent and far reaching that it deserves its own rating, one that eschews the methodological complexities and legal challenges of melding together E and S and G. A climate-specific “C-rating” would empower investors and c-suites alike to make the climate-conscious choices that markets are telling us they want.
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings have clearly caught the market’s attention. In 2021, over $120 billion poured into sustainable investments, more than double the $51 billion logged for 2020. When it comes to climate change, however, ESG ratings are an imperfect vehicle to convey investor-relevant information. Instead, we need to assign companies a stand-alone rating focused on climate risk. Such a climate-specific rating can distill complex information regarding a company’s carbon footprint and climate risk into an intuitive, user-friendly format, while avoiding the flaws that currently mar ESG ratings.
One prominent flaw of ESG ratings lies in the definitional and methodological variations across rating agencies.
To Get Results, the Best Leaders Both Push and Pull Their Teams
Over the past year, there has been a call for leaders to be less demanding and more empathetic toward individual employees. To get results, managers needed to rely on “pull” — giving employees a say in how they carry a task out and using inspiration and motivation to get them going. But an analysis of thousands of 360-degree assessments showed that the most effective leaders also know how to “push” — drive for results by telling people what to do and holding them accountable. The takeaway? Your efforts to increase empathy shouldn’t diminish your ability to, on occasion, push when needed. The data shows that it can be a strong force that builds confidence among employees. The key is to know when to use which approach, depending on the task, the timing, and the people.
When you see a task that needs to be accomplished by your team, do you “push” them to get it done or do you “pull” them in, giving them a say in how they carry it out and using inspiration and motivation to get them going? These are two very different approaches to reach a goal, and the latter is often the best one, but knowing how to combine these two paths is an important skill for managers and leaders.
Take this example from a client of ours. There had been an ongoing discussion about the company’s policies around the environment and sustainability.