In this HCI Webinar, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Jordan Burton about mastering the art of interviewing and tools and strategies for hiring exceptional talent. Jordan Burton has an unusual job—he’s a professional interviewer. Over the past 17 years, he has conducted several hundred multi- hour interviews with CEOs and other C-level candidates on behalf of major private equity firms and corporate Boards. He has leveraged his experiences to train the leadership teams of top VC/PE investors and high-growth companies to become exceptional at hiring and interviewing. Having trained over 3,000 executives and investors, Jordan is renowned for his skill in conducting rich, interactive conversations that delve deep into candidates’ personal and professional histories. 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5000388458315776

In this podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Jordan Burton about mastering the art of interviewing and tools and strategies for hiring exceptional talent. Jordan Burton has an unusual job—he’s a professional interviewer. Over the past 17 years, he has conducted several hundred multi- hour interviews with CEOs and other C-level candidates on behalf of major private equity firms and corporate Boards. He has leveraged his experiences to train the leadership teams of top VC/PE investors and high-growth companies to become exceptional at hiring and interviewing. Having trained over 3,000 executives and investors, Jordan is renowned for his skill in conducting rich, interactive conversations that delve deep into candidates’ personal and professional histories. Check out all of the podcasts in the HCI Podcast Network (https://www.podbean.com/podcast-network/HCI) !

The video explores the critical importance of diversity and inclusion in today’s interconnected and globalized workplaces. Diversity is not a mere trend or a compliance necessity but a strategic advantage that harnesses different perspectives to drive innovation, creativity, and superior team performance. Cultural awareness, the foundation of embracing diversity, begins with genuine listening and suspending personal assumptions to understand the diverse ways people think, communicate, and solve problems based on their backgrounds and experiences. Inclusion is the vital complement to diversity—it ensures that every individual feels valued, respected, and empowered to contribute fully. Together, diversity and inclusion foster psychologically safe environments where employees can be authentic and engage genuinely, leading to stronger, more resilient teams. Effective leadership is key to building and sustaining this culture, and leaders must actively champion inclusive behaviors, encourage open dialogue, and address barriers such as microaggressions. The video concludes with practical steps for leading multicultural teams, emphasizing mentorship, coalition-building, and the deliberate cultivation of safe spaces for debate and collaboration, ultimately driving higher organizational success. Highlights 🌍 Diversity is an indispensable strategic asset in global, interconnected workplaces. 🎧 Cultural awareness starts with listening and suspending assumptions to truly understand others. 🤝 Inclusion means ensuring every individual is valued, heard, and given equitable opportunities. 💡 Diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones by promoting creativity and better decision-making. 🛡️ Psychologically safe environments enable authenticity and peak performance. 👩‍💼 Leaders must model inclusive behaviors and actively address microaggressions. 🔄 Practical leadership actions include encouraging debate, coalition-building, and mentorship for inclusion. Key Insights 🌐 Diversity as a Competitive Advantage: Diversity is no longer optional but a fundamental business imperative in the global economy. Organizations that leverage a broad spectrum of cultural perspectives gain deeper insights and more innovative solutions, helping them adapt faster and outperform competitors. Recognizing it merely as compliance or optics undermines its transformative potential. 👂 The Power of Cultural Awareness Through Listening: Effective cross-cultural interaction requires leaders and team members to pause their own biases and actively listen to different viewpoints. This opens pathways to empathy and respect, encouraging collaboration that bridges cultural divides and enriches problem-solving with varied thought processes. 🧩 Difference in Perspectives Fuels Innovation: Homogeneous teams, which often experience groupthink, risk missing blind spots and innovative ideas due to repetition of similar experiences. Diverse groups bring contrasting life experiences and cognitive approaches that challenge norms, driving creativity and leading to better quality decisions with greater impact. ✅ Inclusion as Essential for Realizing Diversity’s Potential: Simply assembling a diverse team is inadequate without fostering an inclusive culture where every individual feels psychologically safe and valued. Inclusion addresses the qualitative side of diversity by providing equitable access to opportunities, encouraging authentic expression, and reducing turnover caused by alienation or disengagement. 🧠 Psychological Safety Enables Authenticity and High Performance: Workplaces that cultivate trust and respect enable employees to bring their whole selves to work. When individuals feel safe, they are more willing to share unique perspectives and innovative ideas without fear of judgment, which strengthens team cohesion and drives organizational success. 👩‍🏫 Leadership’s Role in Championing Diversity and Inclusion: True inclusion and diversity flourish only when leaders model the behaviors they want to see—actively listening, promoting fairness, addressing biases, and taking action against microaggressions. Leadership accountability ensures consistent cultural embedding rather than superficial initiatives. 🔄 Practical Strategies for Leading Diverse Teams: Effective leadership in multicultural environments includes fostering open dialogue by encouraging diverse opinions and healthy debate, assigning devil’s advocate roles to explore different viewpoints, performing “temperature checks” to assess team dynamics, building coalitions across cultural lines, setting collaborative goals, and implementing mentorship programs to promote inclusion and psychological safety. OUTLINE: 00:00:00 - Diversity and Inclusion as Our Core 00:00:39 - The Lens of Cultural Awareness 00:01:36 - How Diverse Teams Propel Us Forward 00:02:55 - Crafting a Truly Inclusive Culture 00:04:22 - Actions for a Thriving Multicultural Workforce

Abstract: This article explores the complex dynamics of today's multigenerational workplace, where Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z collaborate despite their distinct formative experiences and work preferences. Drawing on academic research and organizational case studies, the authors present practical leadership strategies for effectively managing this diversity. The framework includes understanding each generation's defining traits, building cross-generational awareness, developing individual potential through tailored approaches, implementing flexible communication methods, promoting customized work-life integration options, and proactively managing intergenerational conflicts. The article argues that leaders who recognize and leverage the unique strengths of each generation while fostering mutual respect can transform potential generational tensions into organizational advantages, ultimately enhancing workplace culture, performance, and sustainability in an increasingly age-diverse labor market.

In this video, Jonathan H discusses the concept of the coordination tax, a metaphorical “cost” paid in time and energy rather than money. This tax refers to the invisible friction in productivity caused by excessive coordination efforts — such as meetings about meetings, countless emails, and unclear role assignments — that drain valuable time from doing actual work. As teams grow larger and projects become more complex, the coordination tax tends to increase, leading to delays, missed deadlines, and decreased job satisfaction. Highlights ⏳ Coordination tax refers to lost time and energy in excessive coordination, not financial costs. 🧱 Coordination tax grows as teams get bigger and workflows more complex, impacting output and morale. 📊 Process mapping and clear role definitions help identify and reduce unnecessary coordination points. 💬 Streamlined communication tools save time by consolidating project discussions in one place. 🤝 Empowered self-managed teams significantly cut down coordination overhead by localizing decisions. 🤖 AI and automation tools can handle routine coordination tasks, freeing human focus for meaningful work. ⚖️ Finding the right balance of coordination (“Goldilocks zone”) avoids both chaos and stifling bureaucracy. Key Insights ⏱️ Invisible Time Cost of Coordination: The coordination tax is not an obvious expense but hidden in everyday workflows. Minute-by-minute, hours drain away in administrative meetings, back-and-forth emails, and status updates that add no direct value. Reflecting on how much time is spent “coordinating” rather than executing can reveal surprising inefficiencies that hurt productivity and team morale. 🏗️ Coordination as Necessary Overhead vs. Excess: While some coordination is essential for complex collaborative tasks, it can quickly spiral into overhead that consumes more resources than the actual work. Identifying the point where coordination shifts from helpful structure to cumbersome burden is crucial. Clear workflows, explicit handoffs, and defined roles help keep coordination necessary but lean. 📱 Streamlining Communication to Combat Fragmentation: Fragmented communication across multiple apps or platforms increases cognitive load and wastes time hunting for information. Consolidating project communication in a single, agreed-upon platform can drastically reduce coordination tax by eliminating confusion, duplication, and lost messages. This clarity enables faster decision-making and fewer interruptions. 👥 Empowering Self-Managed Teams Reduces Central Bottlenecks: Decentralizing decision-making to cross-functional, autonomous teams where work happens reduces reliance on hierarchical approval or status updates that inflate coordination demands. The Spotify squad model exemplifies how empowered teams can handle their own coordination internally, significantly cutting delays and meetings. This empowerment also boosts motivation and accountability. 🤖 Leveraging AI and Automation for Routine Tasks: Modern AI tools can take over many routine coordination tasks — scheduling, meeting transcription, progress tracking, and task assignment — that traditionally require manual effort. Each automation step removes a friction point, speeding information flow and reducing cognitive overhead. Over time, these incremental gains compound substantially in saving time and energy. ⚖️ Balancing Coordination: The Goldilocks Zone: Both over-coordination and under-coordination harm productivity. Too much coordination slows teams down and frustrates individuals, while too little leads to confusion, duplicated efforts, and chaos. Establishing guardrails around goals and communication expectations along with regular retrospectives helps teams calibrate their coordination level and remain agile without losing cohesion. 🔄 Continuous Improvement Through Coordination Feedback: Coordination is not a static problem. Organizations that make “how we work together” a regular topic encourage adaptive changes based on team feedback. This ongoing optimization cycle ensures that coordination supports value creation rather than becoming a bureaucratic trap, enabling sustained improvements in productivity and employee satisfaction. OUTLINE: 00:00:00 - Introducing the Coordination Tax 00:00:39 - What Exactly IS This 'Tax' Anyway? 00:01:22 - Seeing and Understanding Coordination Needs 00:01:46 - Taming the Communication Beast 00:02:13 - The Power of Empowered, Self-Managed Teams 00:03:06 - Robots to the Rescue? AI and Automation in Minimizing Routine Coordination 00:03:50 - Balancing Coordination With Essential Autonomy 00:04:44 - Final Thoughts on Conquering the Coordination Tax

Abstract: This article examines how a single toxic employee can undermine an entire team's culture and performance, and why organizational leaders often hesitate to address such problems despite their damaging consequences. Drawing on research demonstrating how negative behaviors spread through social influence and conformity pressures, the authors outline the serious ramifications of inaction: decreased productivity, fractured communication, increased turnover, and potential legal risks. The article identifies common barriers to managerial intervention—including conflict avoidance, inadequate training, favoritism, legal concerns, and misplaced optimism—before presenting evidence-based strategies for effectively addressing problematic behaviors before they contaminate the broader workplace environment. Through a practical case study and actionable recommendations focused on swift intervention, fair evidence collection, behavior-focused feedback, support systems, clear expectations, and consistent follow-up, the article provides a framework for leaders to maintain healthy organizational cultures while treating all employees with dignity.

Organizational silence is a critical challenge faced by many companies, where employees refrain from sharing ideas, concerns, or feedback. This silence is not merely an absence of communication but a hidden barrier that obstructs innovation, creativity, and overall business progress. The transcript emphasizes that organizational silence hampers problem-solving, slows decision-making, and signals deeper systemic issues often rooted in leadership and culture. Highlights 🤐 Organizational silence is a hidden threat that destroys innovation and business growth. 🛡️ Psychological safety is the foundation for an open, trusting workplace culture. 💡 Dissenting opinions challenge norms and improve decision-making and progress. 🔍 Leadership behavior is key to cultivating a culture where employees feel safe to speak up. 📝 Anonymous surveys and focus groups are effective tools to assess organizational voice. 🚫 Zero tolerance for retaliation builds trust and supports open communication. 🎯 Real-world examples like Netflix and Wells Fargo illustrate the impact of speaking up or remaining silent. Key Insights 🤫 Organizational Silence Undermines Competitive Agility: Silence in companies reduces the flow of critical information and ideas, stifling creativity and innovation. This slows problem-solving and decision-making, making organizations less responsive to market changes and competitive challenges. Silence is not passive; it actively deteriorates business performance and can mask systemic issues related to leadership and culture. Organizations operating in fast-paced environments cannot afford this risk. 🛡️ Psychological Safety as a Catalyst for Innovation: Creating psychological safety is essential to enable employees to freely share ideas, questions, concerns, and mistakes without fear of negative consequences. This safety net encourages experimentation and open dialogue, which are necessary for breakthroughs and continuous improvement. Psychological safety fosters trust and mutual respect and should not be mistaken for lack of accountability or avoiding difficult conversations. Instead, it creates a stable environment where honest dialogue is welcomed and contributes to higher performance. 💬 The Power of Dissenting Opinions in Driving Improvement: Healthy organizations value dissent as a means to challenge assumptions and avoid groupthink. When employees feel empowered to voice differing views or highlight flaws, organizations benefit from a richer pool of ideas and alternatives. This critical thinking reduces wasted efforts and costly errors, ultimately improving product quality, service delivery, and internal processes. Encouraging dissent is a proactive strategy to harness diverse perspectives that propel organizational progress. 👥 Leadership Behavior Directly Shapes Communication Culture: The influence of leaders is paramount in fostering or hindering open communication. Leaders must role model behaviors such as active listening, displaying empathy, admitting mistakes, and engaging transparently in difficult conversations. Their visible commitment to these behaviors signals that speaking up is valued, which gradually transforms organizational norms and attitudes toward voice. Effective leadership creates psychological safety and trust, critical precursors to a speak-up culture. 📊 Data-driven Culture Assessment Enables Targeted Interventions: Utilizing anonymous surveys combined with qualitative methods like focus groups offers a balanced view of the current state of organizational voice. Quantitative data reveals broad trends and problem areas, while qualitative insights unpack nuances and root causes behind silence or fear. This dual approach equips organizations to develop informed, tailored strategies to nurture open dialogue, ensuring interventions are grounded in real employee experiences rather than assumptions. 🚫 Zero Tolerance Policies for Retaliation Reinforce Trust and Justice: A clear and enforced no-retaliation stance is essential to protect employees who speak up from backlash. When employees trust that their concerns will be addressed fairly and without negative consequences, they are more likely to contribute ideas and report issues. 🌐 Lessons from Industry Examples Reveal the Stakes of Voice Cultures: Netflix exemplifies how a culture of candor fuels innovation by providing a safe space for bold ideas and rapid opportunity capture. In contrast, Wells Fargo’s culture of silence contributed to unethical behavior with devastating impacts on employees, customers, and shareholders. OUTLINE: 00:00:00 - The High Cost of Silence in Our Workplaces 00:01:01 - The Bedrock of a Speak-Up Culture 00:02:08 - Turning Challenges into Innovations 00:03:25 - Assessing and Nurturing a Culture of Voice 00:04:33 - Real-World Impacts of Speaking Up (and Staying Silent)

Abstract: The intersection of big data and human resources has created a powerful new discipline that is revolutionizing how organizations understand and manage their workforce. This article examines how companies are leveraging people analytics—the practice of applying data-driven methods to analyze employee metrics—to transform their operations and strategy. While data analytics has long been embedded in functions like marketing and finance, its application to human capital management represents a significant evolution in organizational thinking. Forward-thinking companies are now systematically collecting and analyzing employee data throughout the entire employment lifecycle, from recruitment through retirement, to gain unprecedented insights into workforce dynamics. By understanding patterns in how employees think, feel, and behave, these organizations are implementing evidence-based changes to their processes, intentionally shaping their cultures, and making more informed strategic decisions. The result is a competitive advantage through optimized human capital deployment that directly impacts business outcomes across multiple performance dimensions.