OUR EXPERTISE OUR APPROACH CASE STUDIES INSIGHTS CAREERS CONTACT Insights from our award winning team of thought leaders, business analysts and innovators. “There’s only one Coke – and we can be that”: Experian North America’s Stan Oliai on how talent is helping realise the company ambition. The shift to an insight-based approach to working with customers has been crucial to success – but the company needs “high energy, urgency players” to take the market lead, says its EVP of Integrated Sales and Marketing. By MaryLou Costa READ MORE Engineering a turnaround through talent to become a “business of consequence” – interview with Justin Hastings CHRO Experian North America Defining and measuring “what great looks like”, while fostering a highly inclusive culture, is how Experian North America’s Chief HR Officer Justin Hastings is aligning HR with the wider business vision to bridge financial inclusion gaps. By MaryLou Costa READ MORE Wiring People to Win. An Interview with Craig Boundy, CEO Experian North America Experian North America has soared to number 31 on the Fortune 100’s Best Companies to Work For list. But North America CEO Craig Boundy doesn’t have a playbook: it’s as simple as creating a culture where people are wired to win through compassion and commitment, he believes. By MaryLou Costa READ MORE Working from Home: A practical guide about how to make it work brilliantly in the new normal Covid 19 sent large cohorts of the workforce to work from home (very much from home rather than remotely) with no intentional design. Organisations have had to radically restructure the way they interact with and motivate their workforce overnight. Those working from home have been presented with the challenge of the breaking down of traditional… READ MORE Why businesses need transformational leadership to succeed in a post-coronavirus economy Strong leadership is important during every stage of a business’s journey, but especially so during a global pandemic that has triggered unbelievable economic disruption. Unsurprisingly, the coronavirus crisis is causing plenty of organisations to take stock of their current leaders, and weigh up whether they need to change their approach to deal with the inevitable… READ MORE Why does executive search have such a high failure rate and what can you do about it? As the leaders, doers and decision makers at the heart of your business, you know as well as us that overall performance is heavily influenced by your executive team. So, when it’s time to fill executive roles, you are going to pull out all the stops to make sure you hire the best people. Many… READ MORE How to pick a leader: The leadership selection criteria most organisations are getting wrong We all know that the cost of poor leadership is staggering for businesses, so the pressure is on for those responsible for recruitment to successfully fill these all-important roles. It’s certainly not an easy task, especially when there’s a huge pool of potential candidates to assess (yes huge, don’t believe anyone who tells you differently),… READ MORE Why talent management doesn’t work with millennial and Gen Z employees Most businesses are acutely aware of just how important millennial and Gen Z employees are to their organisations. Together, the two demographics make up the majority of the workforce, and their immense technological know-how, high levels of education, and reputation for passion and ambition make them incredibly valuable assets. However, businesses need to work hard… READ MORE 3 leadership lessons from a lifetime of observation Leadership is one of the most debated topics in business. Over the last seventeen years with Chemistry I have had the good fortune to profile and work with exceptional leaders. Pressed to pick only three, here are my most observed traits from the most successful leaders I have worked with. Great leaders are always seeking… READ MORE 5 benefits of talent management debunked Talent is key to the success of any organisation, so it’s unsurprising that many entrepreneurs employ specialist talent management solutions to help create and maintain a high-performing workforce and achieve business goals. This involves recruiting, developing and retaining the best employees in the market. However, many of the benefits of talent management are not as… READ MORE The Life Changing Magic Of NOT Doing The Same Thing And Expecting Different Results. Why the ‘right team’ in the ‘wrong context’ can be a disaster for business We often talk about the importance of giving feedback as a leader. This week I’m writing about the importance of listening to it, borne out of personal experience on both sides of the employer-employee relationship. Sometimes, we have to take on… READ MORE Covid-19: After “The Great Disruption” do businesses have the right leaders in place for our new context? For as long as any of us care to remember we have been chasing the holy grail of a business that disrupts an industry or sector. To find the Uber for Laundry, AirBnB but with cars. If not that then at the very least we have been looking for ways to accelerate and scale our… READ MORE A lesson in leadership from one of the greats: Hire Great. Nothing less will do. This year marks my 28th year in the world of talent. Whether or not that makes me an expert, I’ll leave to my clients to comment, but 28 years definitely prompts some kind of reflection and few better come from recounting those formative learning experiences that continue to stick. This one came early on in… READ MORE What is the cost of poor leadership? We all feel the cost of poor leadership. We’re living it right now. The mismanagement of a pandemic, prejudicial police tactics, inaction on climate change – the cost is severe. Leadership in business can be just as catastrophic, pensions decimated, discriminatory hiring practices, devastating job losses. I was reminded recently of the cautionary tale of… READ MORE Working from home best practice – what does the research say? In the process of developing our new assessment tool to better help you understand a distributed workforce in the “new normal” we have done a lot of reading to inform our thinking, the main points of which we thought we should share. Turns out, people who are more experienced at working remotely cope better –… READ MORE Transforming businesses to adapt to the “new normal” – what should success look like for you? If you are anything like me you will have been thinking a lot about the future recently, and what it holds for the organisational structure of your business in the future. A survey by Gartner in the US has found that three-quarters of chief financial officers believe that at least 5% (only 5% I hear… READ MORE CVs are BS: There has to be a better way to recruit talent Deep down we all know that the CV is total nonsense. “Please sum up the entirety of your professional career and every important thing you’ve ever done at work onto one page. Your livelihood pretty much depends on it. Go!” Before we get into this, try and do this for me, ask yourself if this… READ MORE Is there such a thing as empathetic capitalism? One of our favourite weekly podcasts is Professor Scott Galloway’s Pivot. Though he is a self-professed Capitalist, he has some very forthright views on what that should actually mean that run counter to the greed and avarice we often see associated with the term. In recent weeks he has been particularly scathing about watching big… READ MORE The True Measure of Leadership How do you judge the value of the leaders in your business? What are the true measures of CEO performance? We tend to judge the value of a leadership team to a business on easily defined numbers like stockholder value, market capitalisation, revenue growth and profits. But how can we be judged as business leaders… READ MORE Brain Chemistry One time Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot used to say that elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending fifteen minutes a day reading from a collection of books that would fit on a five foot shelf. The first collection of the Harvard Universal Classics was published as Doctor Eliot’s Five Foot… READ MORE Talent strategy to create home-working performance – understanding motivation Motivations and Working from Home Your work environment has a major impact on your job engagement, satisfaction, and performance. If your workplace isn’t well aligned to your work needs and preferences, you’re less likely to engage in the behaviours that drive success in your role. Shifting from working on site to working from home can… READ MORE Scalable Behavioural Change – 3 Lessons We’ve Learnt Knowledge is not behaviour. If it were, we wouldn’t speed, smoke or fail to keep a 2m social distance from each other when we know that these things are bad for us and everyone around us. At The Chemistry Group, we have helped many companies create effective organisational change and I wanted to share some… READ MORE Chemistry launches global culture fit tool for a leading technology company We are very excited to announce that earlier this month, Chemistry launched a company wide global culture fit tool for a leading technology company – the first of its kind for this organisation. This tool enables the organisation to introduce one view of what is needed to thrive in their working environment regardless of the… READ MORE The ideal job candidate for the future Ask any future-focused recruiter what they are looking for in a candidate and the standard answer will be something around agility, flexibility, managing change, and coping with ambiguity. We want people with chameleon eyes who can see the same facts from different perspectives. We want people who can cope with and reconcile contradictions. We want… READ MORE Resilience – Is it born or made? Can we learn how to bounce back? I recently listened to a talk by a management consultancy firm about resilience and was surprised at how much of it is learnable. I was less surprised when I realised that this company sells resilience training… Nonetheless, it led me to do my own research in an attempt… READ MORE A profile of Scaling Community: Phase One Recently we have been working with Bain & Company around the issue of scaling. Using our methodology, we set out to answer what are the best predictors for identifying great members of the Scaling Community℠? In other words, how can we identify folks who have the right characteristics to turn disruptive ideas into scalable innovation? By James… READ MORE Home Our Expertise Our Approach Case Studies Insights Careers Website Privacy Policy Data Privacy Linkedin Twitter Sign Up to our Newsletter Enter your email to subscribe to our newsletter Submit The Chemistry Group. Copyright 2021. All rights reserved. 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