by Joy Kosta

Two articles in the business section of last Sunday’s New York Times got me to thinking... ”Does It Pass the Smell Test” was about the position a person is in when their leader asks them to bend or break the rules and do something unethical at work. Has the economy moved people to take extreme measures? It’s a slippery slope when you go along the first time, for example because you are a new hire learning the ropes , and when more experienced talent asserts themselves to do the right thing, the article points out, they may be passed over for promotion. Leaders can avoid this dilemma and set an ethical tone with behavioral standards.

On the other hand, sometimes innovation requires such out of the box thinking it breaks the rules by definition. The article, ”Turning Customers Into Creators” takes co-creating vision outside the realm of talent management and involves customers in designing new services and products. Collaborative leadership encourages innovating with customers. As a leader how do you keep track of innovation from your customers? And when customers ask for new types of...

by Joy Kosta

Three decades ago I took a mini-survey on managerial style in Cosmopolitan magazine (which I read back in my 20’s) that said my managerial style at the time was more “male” than “female”-- not surprising, I remembered thinking, because the leader “role models” I worked with were male. Times have changed; with major shifts in workforce demographics, for the first time women make up the majority of the US workforce. And while women head up fewer than 3% of the Fortune 1,000 companies, Hay Group found that the lower you go down the organizational ranks, the better the situation gets. And we’ve all learned a lot. Mary Fontaine, global head of Hay Group's leadership and talent practice, in an interview with Business Week , said, "…outstanding women [leaders] use a better blend of what we think of as traditional masculine styles—being directive, authoritative, and leading by example and as well as feminine ones… to be more nurturing, inclusive, and collaborative." Sharon Allen, chairperson of Deloitte since 2003, has been with her company more than thirty years and earned her way up— find out what she has to say...