Mellissa Lezama

I always love encouraging my team members to be on the look out for new and emerging HR trends and that sometimes the only way to find them is to do courses on different platforms, read articles and posts about what other companies are doing and keep top of mind that "best practice" is a dynamic, ever-changing concept. I apply the same approach to myself because I'm always mindful that one of the best things I can do for my clients is to make sure that I'm staying on track with or ahead of emerging trends, tools, practices and processes that can help their business in some way. This is even more necessary than ever before where the business landscape is competitive and evolving on a daily basis. So staying current and ahead is a must!

While realistic goals are safe and always encouraged, I don't think there's anything wrong with stretching yourself to want to achieve something that may seem lofty, grandiose or unachievable to others. Regardless, keeping sight of those goals - realistic, seemingly unattainable or otherwise - and believing you can achieve them, is one way to keep you focused on moving forward, and help you to not be thwarted or detracted by the obstacles and challenges that will certainly come your way. However, what you need to be truly realistic about is that the journey to your goals may not be an easy or straightforward one. Even so, keep your eye on the prize, keep pushing through, and keep believing that you are destined to achieve!

While it's great to do the information gathering, analyze the gaps and pitfalls and determine what needs to be done, so many organizations sabotage themselves by remaining frozen just before the execution phase because of leadership's own resistance to change or failure to truly ensure the readiness of the organization and employees to adopt and adapt to what's coming. This paralysis is even harder to accept because there's already acknowledgement and awareness of the problem but an unwillingness to push through to resolve them. Business leaders need to challenge themselves to overcome this hesitation and recognize that doing so will not only lead to improved business efficiency but increased competitiveness and long term survivability.

While it's certainly important to understand the current gaps of your training audience, another important consideration is ensuring the training also covers future skills and capability needs in the age of rapidly evolving workplace technologies and systems. It makes no sense developing training content that becomes inadequate, or even obsolete, shortly thereafter, as this is a grave disservice to your training participants.

I would add that adaptive decision-making skills are important for leaders in this rapidly evolving economic climate. Being able to "read the tea leaves" and adjust your response or guidance and direction to your team will allow employees and the organization to be agile and ready to take on almost anything, which is even more crucial with the undeniably exponential advancements in technology and increasing globalization. Leaders who are able to quickly and effectively adapt their approaches and the decisions they make under varying circumstances will definitely be better poised to have even more meaningful and impactful influence on others in their network and beyond.

While defining objectives and KPIs is of utmost importance, just as important is leaders incorporating sufficient flexibility into their performance management system to allow them to adjust these same KPIs to account for changes in the work environment, unplanned industry forces and other external factors that may impact the employee's - or the company's - ability to achieve and deliver as expected. This reassures employees that they will only be held accountable for achieving performance objectives that are reasonably within their control.