Curiosity IS the Strategy | Julian Lighton

Do you ever wonder what's next? Sure you do for the company you work with and your team, but what about for yourself?

Julian Lighton spent more than 30 years watching companies decide whether to develop people or rent them. He advised them at McKinsey. He operated inside them at Cisco and Hitachi. He convened them as Chief Strategy Officer at four billion-dollar public companies. Now he coaches the people leaders inside them.

His verdict on the last fifteen years is direct. Companies traded the family metaphor for the sports team, and something essential left with it.

His prescription is smaller than you expect, and it starts with a question you ask another human being.

• The plan is 10 percent. The people are 90 percent.
• Technology companies traded the family metaphor for the sports team. Coaching for this season replaced development for a career.
• Managing and leading are taught skills rather than innate ones, which makes teaching them somebody's job.
• A woolly mammoth takes a team. Whatever is worth doing at work exceeds what one person carries alone.
• Every ask has two halves: Know why is the logic. Care why is what the person receives.
• People learn more through failure than through success. Most talent metrics measure success alone.
• Attraction runs in four moves: competency, context, culture, mindset.
• Academy companies once told candidates what they would learn. Now the conversation covers only what they will do.
• Values decide the room. People resonate or fail to resonate inside the first three minutes.
• Retention starts as you map reality: who holds the crucial control points, and what each person does well.
• Relationship with a manager multiplies iterations. Iterations grow engagement. Engagement grows loyalty.
• Curiosity opens a relationship. Kindness decides which kind.

Julian's one thing for the Work Positive community, starting today:

Go back to curiosity.

Be curious about somebody else, and you ask questions. Ask questions, and you find yourself in a form of relationship with them. Ask those questions with kindness, and you find yourself in the right kind of relationship.

Rather than regarding people as economic units, job codes, or candidates, ask them some questions about them.

Get Julian's Amazon best-seller, Navigating Your Next: Discover the Career You Want and the Path to Get There. Two QR codes live inside it. The one at the front opens a resource library for managing your career: resume formats, cover letter formats, ways to articulate your value, how to network, how to run your campaign. The one at the back opens a hidden page on his site with links to everything he drew on while writing, including forty-plus books and a stack of lectures.

Then visit julianlighton.com for his webinars and resources.

Then send him a direct message on LinkedIn. Julian welcomes the conversation.

Julian describes a talent conversation most companies stopped having. Curiosity about the person in front of you, asked with kindness, is where it restarts.

Your culture is already answering that question for every person on your team. Find out what it says.

Take the free Work Positive Culture Assessment. A few minutes, no cost, and you receive personalized strategies to grow culture, grow people, and grow profits.

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