“I hope to inspire and motivate HR professionals to think more of themselves like thermostats where they can actually change the temperature,” says Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., president and CEO, SHRM. The goal is to make the workplace even more empathetic to the employee in light of the past few years.
WorkingNation sat down with Taylor at his organization’s annual conference in New Orleans.
“I described a number of situations and examples of where we as HR professionals – as opposed to just telling our employers, senior managers and senior executives in our organizations what employees are saying – how about influence their hearts and their minds in such a way that we actually cause the effect that we want.”
Taylor says all the disruption of the last couple years is giving HR the opportunity to really pay attention to employees’ insights.
“I talk about HR needing to engage in what I’m going to call extreme listening and nuanced listening. When we think about wanting to understand culture, it’s just not enough to survey the senior leaders in an organization or the most tenured employees in the organization or the high potentials in an organization. We’ve got to find a way to extract insights from every type of employee in an organization.”
Taylor notes that empathy is the new workforce currency. “Employees are expecting – I’ll dare to say – demanding empathetic leadership.”
According to Taylor, they are saying, “’I need leaders who are willing to try to understand what my experiences are, my whole experiences so that they can maximize my contributions in the workplace.’”
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Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.
Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.
Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.
Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.
Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.
Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.
