Recognizing Employee Contributions

Prince William inspired me to hire more people that have NO EXPERIENCE in our industry, here's why you should too 👇🏾 I've worked with Prince William for a few years on his mission to end homelessness in the UK through his Royal Foundation programme, Homewards. I've watched how he and it work up close. I expected something that looked like a traditional charity. What he's built looks more like a startup. He's gone to six locations across the UK and used his unique leverage to pull together the widest possible group of people with the widest possible range of skills - people who'd never usually work together - and pointed all of them at the problem of homelessness. In some locations that coalition includes landowners, tech start-ups, a homelessness charity, a bank, a mental health organisation, employers, recruitment companies, local schools and more... And it's producing brand new solutions💡 In Cornwall: new homes, all now lived in by people who were previously homeless. In Aberdeen: empty properties brought back into use. In Newport: abandoned land unlocked. Elsewhere, discarded furniture donated to newly housed people. Many of the partners have worked on homelessness for decades on their own, but together, they're producing ideas and results none of them managed alone. And that is the lesson... Business history shows that innovation usually comes from rare combinations of skills coming together. When you stack skills that are complementary but rarely found together, and you get new answers to old problems. The same is true inside a company. The first innovation any company makes is its org chart - which is basically just a map of the skills it's collected and arranged. Hire the same types of people as your competitors, with the same experience, and you raise the probability of getting the same ideas as them. Hire expertise from outside your industry - skills that are rare in your world but complementary to it - and you build divergent thinking into the org chart itself. Apple is the example I always give of "skill stacking"... Steve Jobs said the Macintosh was great because it was built by musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians who ALSO happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. They stacked liberal arts skills on engineering skills - a combination Apple's competitors didn't have and it produced products the world had never seen. Prince William has taken the same idea and pointed it at one of society's hardest problems. And from what I've seen up close, it's working! So maybe, as employers, we've got things a bit backwards. Maybe the CV with "no industry experience" might be exactly the person your company is missing 🤔! And maybe we need to start viewing a lack of relevant experience as an opportunity for new innovation. Food for thought?

The New York Times profiled a start-up with 28 employees serving nearly 50 million users. That company is us. The traditional startup playbook: raise massive funding, hire hundreds of employees, and worry about profitability "later." But there's another way. Everyone at Gamma could fit in a small restaurant. We're not just surviving—we've been profitable for 15+ consecutive months, with revenue growing month over month, and lifetime negative net burn (we have more money in the bank than we've raised). This isn't an accident. We've deliberately designed our organization to maximize impact per person. Instead of creating specialist silos, we hire versatile generalists who can solve problems across domains. Rather than building management hierarchies, we find player-coaches who both lead and execute. Our team leverages AI tools throughout our workflow - Claude for data analysis, Cursor for coding efficiency, NotebookLM for customer research synthesis. These aren't just productivity hacks; they're force multipliers. Examples: — When our growth PM needed better analytics, he didn't file a ticket with a data team—he built a self-serve system that anyone can use without SQL knowledge. — When our marketing lead needed to understand our customers better, she fed thousands of interactions into an LLM and created actionable personas that now guide our entire strategy. — When our design team needs to test a hypothesis, we create a rapid prototype and show it to our power users. What we're seeing isn't just about "doing more with less." It's about fundamentally changing what's possible per person. The most valuable employees aren't specialists who excel in narrow domains - they're resourceful problem-solvers who continuously expand their capabilities. This approach creates remarkable resilience. Since everyone understands multiple functions, we don't have single points of failure when someone leaves or moves to another project. If you're building today, the question isn't how quickly you can scale headcount … it's how much impact you can create with the smallest possible team. The future belongs to tiny teams of extraordinary people.

This Teacher Changes 30 Lives Each Morning Here's Why This Works Every morning, a teacher greets her students one by one - not with rules, but with choice: A hug, A high-five, a nod, or quiet. A ritual so simple. Yet it tells 30 children: You are seen. You are safe. You belong. Here’s what this teaches us about leadership - and how to apply it at work: 1. Honor Autonomy (Self-Determination Theory) When people get to choose how they engage, they show up with more agency. Autonomy isn’t about letting go of structure - it’s about giving room to opt in. Try this: 🔷 Let people set their own work cadence - async, deep focus, or collaborative sprints 🔷 Ask: “What support looks best for you right now?” *** 2. Create Micro-Moments of Connection (Broaden-and-Build Theory) We don’t need hour-long one-on-ones to build trust. A genuine check-in. A name spoken with intention. That’s the glue. Try this: 🔷 Pause to celebrate effort, not just outcomes - a quick voice note, a public thank-you 🔷 Remember small details - a kid’s soccer game, a partner’s surgery - and follow up *** 3. Signal Safety in Small Ways (Polyvagal Theory) The nervous system responds before the intellect does. Safety is felt first. And safe leaders create brave spaces. Try this: 🔷 Ask: “Is now a good time?” before giving feedback or asking for decisions 🔷 Stay calm and present, especially when tensions rise - your tone sets the tone *** 4. Design for Anticipatory Joy (Affective Forecasting) The brain lights up for what’s coming next. The ritual at the door gave students a reason to show up smiling. Try this: 🔷 Drop a kind, unexpected message in the team chat - just because 🔷 Celebrate mundane milestones - 100 days in the role, 50th client call, 1st brave no *** 5. Anchor Culture in Meaningful Rituals (Harvard Research on Rituals) Rituals are memory-makers. They codify values in action - they say, this is who we are. Try this: 🔷 End each quarter with storytelling: what stretched us? what did we learn? 🔷 Welcome new hires not with logistics, but with a story of your team's "why" *** This teacher didn’t redesign the curriculum. She redesigned how people enter the day. You don’t need a big title to lead like that - Just the courage to meet people at the door. 💬 What’s one ritual you’ve seen shift the energy of a space - or want to create where you work? 🔁 Repost to inspire kind actions in the workplace. 🔔 Follow Bhavna Toor for more on conscious leadership.

You want a meritocracy? A workplace where results and performance are the strongest predictors of success? I spend all day helping leaders actually create those, and the work isn't what you might think. 💡 Creating a true meritocracy means creating and stewarding rigorous systems for hiring, feedback, and promotion. If a single person can act on their biases to hire people who they like, promote their friends, or offer career-limiting feedback with no basis in reality, you don't have a meritocracy. Strong systems include guardrails to mitigate individual and group bias from compromising merit-based processes. Structured interviewing, scoring rubrics, defined promotion criteria, hiring panels, and other practices that bring rigor and standardization into decision making can help protect against bias. 💡 Creating a true meritocracy means creating shared definitions of "merit." What truly makes a candidate "the best?" Is it their domain expertise? The volume of work product they produce? The quality of their work? Their communication skills, ability to work in a team, voice important feedback? Some combination of all of these? True meritocracies create shared definitions of "merit" based on what matters most to the organization, and institutionalize these definitions through their recruitment and outreach, decision making processes, internal communications, and reward structure. 💡 Creating a true meritocracy means stamping out discrimination. An organization's culture is defined by the worst behavior it is willing to tolerate. Every case of discrimination, prejudice, and mistreatment — or corruption, nepotism, and favoritism, for that matter — undermines meritocracy. If merit truly matters, then leaders must exercise their power to swiftly address every violation of it, and identify their root cause to make sure it cannot happen again. Failure to do so risks the entire project of meritocracy being seen as only for show. I find it ironic that, as someone who has been doing this work of creating FAIR workplaces that aspire to meritocracy for nearly a decade, the people clamoring most loudly for "meritocracy" right now seem the least informed about what that actually looks like. They seem to operate under the principle that TAKING AWAY intentionality and rigor from decision making, REMOVING accountability and standardization, and ENABLING mistreatment and corruption is best for workplaces. There's a word for that — mediocracy, workplaces where incompetence rules, where the best talent is driven away or overlooked. #Diversity, #equity, and #inclusion and #FAIR practitioners, the false dichotomy of DEI vs. merit is a sleight of hand meant to put us on the defensive. Recognize the truth: that DEI done right is how we achieve our aspirations of meritocracy, a meritocracy that has never existed in the past and does not yet exist in the present — but if we succeed, might exist in the future.

Some of your best employees are quietly doing the worst thing possible: 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐫𝐨𝐤𝐞𝐧 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤. They’re not trying to deceive anyone. In fact, they’re doing what dedicated people do: stepping in, filling gaps, solving problems off the radar. But those invisible heroics? That’s your 𝐡𝐢𝐝𝐝𝐞𝐧 𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲. It’s the shadow system behind the official process. The undocumented rework. The manual fixes that no dashboard ever sees. The clever workarounds that keep things moving... until they don’t. And on the surface, everything looks fine: KPIs are green, projects on track, processes are mapped. But scratch just below, and you’ll often find entire micro-operations stitched together with tribal knowledge, duct tape, and Excel. It’s not malicious. It’s survival. It’s also unsustainable. Because hidden factories don’t just mask inefficiencies, they institutionalize them. And over time, the organization becomes addicted to these invisible safety nets. The system starts optimizing for appearances instead of outcomes. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐭? Lost capacity. Falsely trusted data. A culture that rewards firefighting over fixing. Armand Feigenbaum, the OG of Total Quality Control, nailed it: You can’t fix what you don’t measure. Hidden factories consume 𝟐𝟎-𝟒𝟎% 𝐨𝐟 𝐚𝐧 𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧’𝐬 𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐲 and can be the difference between thriving and surviving. If there’s one shift I’d urge leaders to make, it’s this: Stop asking only for results, and start asking how those results are being achieved. Not everything that matters shows up in your metrics. Not everything that’s broken triggers an alert. If you want to scale excellence, you need to make the invisible... undeniable. 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐞: https://lnkd.in/ehy-XhAr ******************************************* • Visit www.jeffwinterinsights.com for access to all my content and to stay current on Industry 4.0 and other cool tech trends • Ring the 🔔 for notifications!

"Why does our top performer get the worst reviews?" the VP asked me. I was reviewing their annual performance data. "Show me," I said. She pulled up the ratings. Diana: 2.8 out of 5. Below average on "collaboration." Low marks for "team player." "What's her actual performance?" I asked. "Exceeded every target. Landed our biggest client. Trained three new hires." "So why the low scores?" "Her peer reviews are dragging her down." I scanned the comments. "Too direct." "Challenges ideas too much." "Not supportive enough." "Let me talk to Diana," I said. "I used to give honest feedback," Diana told me. "Said our pricing model was broken. Got dinged for 'negativity.'" "What happened with the pricing?" "They finally fixed it six months later. After we lost two major accounts." "What else?" "I questioned why we needed  eleven approvals for a simple contract change. Manager said I wasn't being collaborative." "Are you still giving feedback?" "No. I learned my lesson. Now I smile. Nod. Say everything's great. My reviews are improving." "But nothing's actually improving?" "We're making the same mistakes. Just with better vibes." She chuckled. I went back to the VP. "Your review system doesn't measure performance," I said. "It measures compliance." "That's not true." "When was the last time someone got promoted for challenging bad ideas?" Silence. "When did someone get rewarded for preventing a mistake?" More silence. "You've trained your best people to stay quiet. And your mediocre people to stay nice." A few months later, they redesigned the system. Added a category: "Constructive Challenge." Points for identifying problems early. Rewards for preventing costly mistakes. Diana got promoted. "What changed?" I asked the VP. "We stopped confusing agreement with alignment. Stopped mistaking silence for harmony." "And?" "Turns out our 'difficult' people were our most valuable. They actually cared enough to speak up." Here's the truth about performance reviews: Most companies don't reward performance. They reward performance theater. The person who says the meeting was great beats the person who says it wasted an hour. The person who agrees with bad ideas beats the person who prevents disasters. You think you're measuring contribution. You're measuring conformity. And your best people? They've already figured out the game. They're just deciding whether to play it or find somewhere that values truth over comfort. _____ Like my content? Give me a follow. Want to see more of it? Click the 🔔 on my profile.

Amit dedicated 7 years to his company. He started at ₹12 LPA and, after years of hard work, reached ₹20 LPA. One day, he casually asked a new hire about their salary—₹30 LPA. Shock. Betrayal. He had trained others, handled crises, and never dropped the ball. Yet, a newcomer with less experience made ₹10 lakh more. His manager’s response? "We value you, but external hires are paid market rates." Reality check: New hires get market pay. Loyal employees get small increments. Appreciation ≠ Compensation. Amit tested the market and got a 40% hike in 90 days. Suddenly, his company wanted to match it—but he had already moved on. Lesson? Loyalty should be a two-way street. Know your worth. Keep an eye on market trends. Negotiate what you deserve. Because staying too long without evaluating your worth is the costliest mistake.

At Microsoft, I once joined a war room at 2 AM. The VP of Azure was sharing his Visual Studio screen. Debugging. Deep in the weeds. He managed 21,000 engineers and delivered $40B in revenue. But that night? He wasn’t a VP. He was an engineer. Here's what I learned: When things are on fire, great leaders don’t sit back. They lead from the front. They get their hands dirty. They push forward. They unblock. But when it’s time to develop products? They lead from the back. They empower teams. They clear blockers. They let experts be experts. Most people get this backward. They micromanage the creative process—then vanish when things break. But the best leaders are invisible when things go right, present when they go wrong. Next time your fingers itch to step in, ask yourself: Are you leading from the front or just getting in the way?

Riya was a dedicated, hardworking employee. She gave her 100%, stayed late, helped others, and never once asked for praise. She believed her work would speak for itself. But it didn’t. ¬Her efforts went unnoticed. ¬No appreciation. ¬No recognition. ¬No promotion. Still, Riya stayed—until one day, she didn’t. She found a better opportunity. One where she was seen, heard, and valued. And she quietly moved on. Dear Companies, Employees don’t leave all of a sudden. They leave after being unheard and unseen for too long. Key Learnings for Leaders & Organizations: ✔️Not all high performers are loud. Look beyond the voices that dominate meetings. Some of your best people may be quietly delivering excellence. ✔️Appreciation is free. A small thank-you or public recognition can go a long way in employee morale. ✔️Promotions should reflect contribution, not just visibility. Talent and effort matter more than volume. ✔️Listen actively. Many employees won’t voice dissatisfaction until they’ve already made the decision to leave. Don’t wait for the resignation letter to value someone. By then, it’s too late. Employees stay where they are respected, not just retained. #leadership #career #success #hr