Author: gothamCulture

The Network Gap and its Impact on the War for Talent

By gothamCulture
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Network

As much as you may believe in your heart that two, equally qualified people should have equal opportunity to thrive professionally, the fact is, this isn’t the reality in many cases. There is a wealth of research that supports the notion that the strength of a person’s network has a significant impact on their ability to successfully manage their careers and to gain access to opportunities that others may have access to.

LinkedIn, the premier professional networking platform has utilized their massive wealth of user data to understand how a person’s network not only supports their long-term success but what factors contribute to (or stifle) a person’s ability to develop healthy networks throughout their lives.

Meg Garlinghouse shared these insights in her article on the LinkedIn Official Blog

  1. Where you grow up. LinkedIn users who grow up in areas with a median income above $100k are 3x more like to have a stronger* network than other users.
  2. Where you go to school. Users who attend top schools are 2x more likely to have stronger networks.
  3. Where you work. Users who have work experience at a top company are nearly 2x more likely to have stronger networks.

This ‘network gap’ presents a reality that can hinder career opportunity for some simply based on factors that are partially, or completely, out of their control. Read More…

Leadership Lessons From Unlikely Authors

By gothamCulture
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leadership lessons

I’m currently in the process of prepping my house to go on the market and our real estate agent has issued the edict that I have to box up some of the books in my office. So, I’ve been reluctantly working through the shelves, trying to decide which ones I can live without until we move sometime in the summer. Despite my initial resistance, the packing process has actually turned out to be a really good thing. In fact, I’ve discovered two really important things:

  1. I have a lot of books. In fact, I may have a problem. Even after donating a few to the local library, I’ve still got far too many, if I’m perfectly honest.
  2. Nearly each book on my shelf has been the source of a valuable piece of leadership insight that has helped me on my journey of continuous learning.

Read More…

Healthy Leadership Practices to Cure What Ails You

By gothamCulture
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Healthy Leadership Practices

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months (and perhaps that’s where we all ought to be moving to right now!), I’m sure you’ve been inundated with updates, plans, and preparations for COVID-19. There are a lot of great resources out there that can help you know what to do as we move into a new way of working and leading. And there are plenty of experts out there with tips for building resilience and adaptability while leading under crisis. Folks like the Center for Creative Leadership and ProHabits have great resources available or on the way to help. But, I thought I’d share a few key practices that you may have overlooked in your efforts to lead your team through this current or any future crisis. Read More…

Building Empathy To Address Critical Talent Gaps

By gothamCulture
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organizational empathy

Talent challenges continue to be a priority for most agencies across the federal government. Frequent turnover, hard to fill roles, and shortages in mission-critical skill sets are all too common in most federal agencies.

There are countless strategies and approaches agency leaders can, and have, tried to address these complex challenges. But, building organizational empathy may be just the tool HR leaders need to make a near term impact.

Building organizational empathy is a strategic element for organizations trying to hire and retain top talent in an increasingly tight labor market. Research by the benefits technology firm, Business Solver in their State of Workplace Empathy report reveals that empathy is a key driver of retention, motivation, and productivity. More than 90% of employees surveyed indicated they were more likely to stay with an empathetic employer. In fact, respondents were even willing to trade off hours and pay in favor of increased empathy.

In an increasingly competitive talent environment, building a culture of empathy should be a key part of the people strategy in all organizations.

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Organizational Agility And Resilience – Two Critical Sides Of The Same Coin

By gothamCulture
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Agility and Resilience

In a world where longstanding business models are being disrupted (many at the hand of a staggering rate of technological advances), you won’t get ten paces without hearing terms like agility and resilience being thrown around. This dynamic has seen the rise of brands like Amazon/Whole Foods, Netflix, and Uber as well as the demise of others like Kodak who failed to see and respond quickly enough to changes in the market. If you’re reading this and thinking that this isn’t something that applies to you, you’re sadly mistaken. Even historically stable industries are being disrupted in ways that require the ability to adapt and transform in order to thrive.

The belief that organizations must master the ability to innovate and drive new products and services to market in order to beat out the competition has contributed to the focus on agility as a critical success factor. These organizations must “fail fast”, quickly learn from mistakes, and adapt to changing market conditions in order to outperform their competitors in the long-term.

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Webinar Download: Tips for Solving People-Related Issues

By gothamCulture
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People-Related Issues

Did you know? Senior leaders spend 61% of their time solving people-related issues.

Imagine the impact you could have on your client’s business if you resolved these challenges. In this recorded webinar, we discuss HOW you can advise on talent and strategy to bring value to your engagements.

Learn from Tim Bowden, Partner at gothamCulture and Russ Thomas, Regional Director of Partnerships at The Predictive Index:

  • Practical tips for diagnosing people problems
  • How to use people data to drive solutions
  • How to align your client’s talent to their strategy
  • Lessons from the field

Access the webinar recording here.

Why Are We Still Investing In Engagement & Self-Actualization At Work?

By gothamCulture
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For over two decades, since the concept came into awareness, many managers have been working to improve employee engagement. Historically, though, you can trace the roots engagement back to the work of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. When Maslow’s general theory of motivation was translated into the world of management, self-actualization became the goal for all employees — an idea that many authors (e.g. here) have since related to employee engagement.

Since Maslow entered management, managers have pushed for engagement, finding fulfillment, or simply “doing what you love” on the job. But, this is a narrow interpretation of an already pretty narrow view of human motivation.

A quick look at global employee engagement suggests that the way we’ve been pursuing self-actualizing work is likely misguided. Despite massive investments over the past two decades, we’ve seen little change in global employee engagement. In fact, a recent report from Gallup celebrates a 1% increase actively engaged members of the workforce with no change in the percent who are actively disengaged — and says nothing about the consistent majority of workers who are neither actively engaged or disengaged.

All of the effort and investment in driving engagement and self-actualization typically ignores what we really know about motivation. Motivation at work, and beyond, is deeply individual. We know that work motivation isn’t simply a linear progression toward self-actualization, engagement, or happiness. What then should a well-intentioned manager who’s been overdosed with Maslow do to help improve employee experience and performance?

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Why I’m Taking a Day Off From Being Busy – And You Should Too

By gothamCulture
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For the past 12 years since my family relocated to Northern Virginia, I’ve talked to my dad at least once a week on the phone. I’ve noticed over the past few weeks, though, that our conversations have evolved into a pretty familiar pattern. One that around various versions of one question: “What’s keeping you busy these days?” Of course, I’ve always got a list – starting new projects at work or at home, scrambling to get the next proposal in or find the next client, preparing for the sale of our house, or any other number of to-do’s whether large or small. Even my dad who’s been retired for the past five or so years also seems to always be busy. This phenomenon certainly isn’t unique to me and my dad.

The Culture of Being Busy
A few years ago the Atlantic published an article asserting that “Ugh, I’m so busy” has become the status symbol of our time. And in 2018, sociologist Anna Akbari’s Psychology Today article challenged readers to define their success not by their lack of time, but by the quality time they dedicated to the people and things that they loved. It seems our culture has come to embrace busyness over all else. The idea is that to be successful and happy we need to constantly have schedules filled to the brim. That being important means battling multiple conflicting priorities. Or that productivity means just having too much on our plate to possibly fit in one more thing.

And I think I’ve taken the bait, hook, line, and sinker. I pursue hobbies with such zeal that they look more like vocations. And I work so hard to provide my kids with opportunities, experiences, and activities that I stay busy keeping them busy. But at the end of the day, I don’t think I’m any more productive, significantly happier or more well off because of how busy I’ve become. Nor do I think any of the other folks I encounter who are constantly busy are any of these things either.

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A Study in the Art of Servant Leadership

By gothamCulture
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“Know your Marines and look out for their welfare.”

“Employ your Marines in accordance with their capabilities.”

These are two leadership principles the Marine Corps instills into its leaders at all levels, regardless of rank or seniority. These principles are taken seriously, as they can mean the difference between mission success and failure, life and death. Despite the stakes being different in the business world, these two concepts are vital to a leader’s success and, more importantly, that of their subordinates.

In our technologically infused, fast-paced world of business, the speed and amount of information available to us is unprecedented. Transactions now move faster, decisions are made quicker, and we’re able to collaborate and complete tasks more rapidly. However, leaders have largely missed one important side effect that can degrade the performance of their teams. Behavioral scientists call it the cognitive load, and it takes a toll on our teams more than we realize.

Simply put, the cognitive load is the mental “work” needed for any thought or action. Every task, conversation, email, project, meeting, etc. has a cognitive load price tag, and we all have a different capacity for what we can take on. This is why we spend hours refining our presentations to our leadership – there’s just too much information for them to consider and they want you to reduce the cognitive load required to make a decision.

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Gotham Government Services Acquires Assets of Abrams Learning & Information Systems

By gothamCulture
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Gotham Government Services LLC (GGS), a Virginia SDVOSB, will acquire all assets of Abrams Learning & Information Systems (ALIS).  GGS, under the leadership of Chris Cancialosi, will continue providing learning and performance improvement services to clients at the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), Army Futures Command (AFC), and other Federal clients.

ALIS was founded in 2004 by President and Chief Executive Officer General (Ret) John Abrams. The company provides government and business clients with solutions and services in workforce development, strategic planning, change management, program management, exercise support, and executive and management education.

GGS was created as a partnership between, gothamCulture, a New York based SDVOSB organizational culture firm, and a long-standing federally focused training company and will continue to serve all geographic markets and contracts that ALIS currently serves.

“We are honored to bring on the ALIS teams that are providing analysis support to AFC and training development support at VBA,” said Chris Cancialosi, Founder and Managing Partner of GGS and the company’s parent firm gothamCulture.  “As a former armor officer, the opportunity to honor the Abrams legacy is of great importance to me. As a veteran, continuing to support our former and current Warfighters is a deeply personal mission. And adding the ALIS team to gothamCulture’s core capabilities in organizational culture, leadership development, and people strategy offers these and other clients new avenues for supporting their mission objectives.”

“As the Founder and CEO of ALIS, my father’s focus was always on doing great work, making a difference, and taking care of our ALIS family,” said Elizabeth Abrams Bauernshub, Vice President of Abrams Learning & Information Systems, Inc.  “With our shared core values, Gotham Government Services is the right company to lead ALIS’s work into this next chapter, which brings growth and opportunity for both our clients and our employees.”

Gotham Government Services is a Service-Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia. We provide government and business clients with solutions and services in workforce development, strategic planning, change management, program management, exercise support, and executive and management education. As a recognized leader in our field, we have worked with clients in government, academia, and private organizations to address their critical needs and meet their goals for the future. For more information visit www.gothamgovernment.com.