In this evergreen article published in Harvard Business Review, Ben Dattner shares an article and scorecard designed to help you overcome unconscious bias and make better hiring decisions. Scorecard template included. Given that most organizations spend roughly 70% of their operating budgets on workforce expenses, it is noteworthy how rare it is for organizations to measure the success of hiring managers in their ability to select the right candidates. It is also rare for individuals to hold themselves accountable for…

In this article for the Harvard Business Review, Ben Dattner explains why you should interview people who turn down a job with your company. Successfully competing for top talent involves both selling jobs to the best candidates and retaining the highest performing incumbents. In order to be seen as an employer of choice with a compelling value proposition for employees, many companies measure turnover and conduct exit interviews with departing employees to gather feedback about the experiences people had working…

Ben Dattner co-authored this article published in the Harvard Business Review that offers insight on how to deal with an executive in the wrong role. Sometimes, executive coaching reveals that the person being coached is in the wrong role. When this becomes clear, bosses too often prematurely conclude that they have to fire the person or that the coaching was a waste. However, instead of seeing this…more In the traditional view of executive coaching, an executive, with her boss’s participation,…

Ben Dattner shares an article on how board members should approach assessing the CEO’s performance. As a board member, one of your most important responsibilities is to evaluate the current performance of the CEO, while simultaneously ensuring that he or she receives the right feedback, incentives and support in order to develop in the role over time. While this sounds simple and straightforward in theory, in practice evaluating a CEO can be both fraught and potentially risky. In my experience…

Ben Dattner co-wrote this article that explains why being a great second in command requires emotional intelligence. In 1959, John French and Bertram Raven, social psychologists, published their “Five Bases of Power” model, which has been highly influential in social and organizational psychology ever since. The five kinds of power they delineated included the ability to reward or punish, power derived from one’s rank or role, expert power (which is a function of knowledge and expertise), and what they termed…

Ben Dattner shares an article published in Harvard Business Review that reveals the source of most conflicts in the workplace.  Conflict happens everywhere, including in the workplace. When it does, it’s tempting to blame it on personalities.  But more often than not, the real underlying cause of workplace strife is the situation itself, rather than the people involved. So, why do we automatically blame our coworkers? Chalk it up to psychology and organizational politics, which cause us to oversimplify and…

  Ben Dattner and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic explain why the opinions of others shape our personal ‘brand’ and how to shape our digital personas for the best possible results in this article published in Harvard Business Review. Who am I, really?’ Philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists – not to mention poets and artists — have been trying to answer this question for centuries. The good news for business leaders is that they don’t need to turn into armchair psychotherapists, or get an…

  Ben Dattner co wrote this article for Harvard Business Review on the issue of building ethical AI for talent management.  Artificial intelligence has disrupted every area of our lives — from the curated shopping experiences we’ve come to expect from companies like Amazon and Alibaba to the personalized recommendations that channels like YouTube and Netflix use to market their latest content. But, when it comes to the workplace, in many ways, AI is still in its infancy. This is…