OK, the topic of feedback isn't stand-up comedy funny. It's funny as in odd because there are so many contradictions surrounding it. Here are five practices to help managers bring feedback to life as the performance-enhancing tool it is capable of being:
The role of top leaders in guiding strategy creation is well documented. Less understood is that once the strategy is formed and shared, the leader’s actions must focus on minimizing organizational friction—the processes, cultural nuances, and political and personal impediments that threaten the organization’s speed-of-execution.
Not talking about the right issues at the right time closes off access to an unknown series of potentially game-changing outcomes. It's like closing the door on your future as a firm and your career as a manager.
I love curious managers, teams, and individuals. Curiosity is the stardust of creation in our organizations. And while the questions and the explorations and the discoveries are all fascinating, what we as organizational leaders have our sights set on, is realizing ideas that turn into changes that promote positive outcomes. Here are three ideas to help improve your ideas-to-outcomes results:
Good managers work hard at pushing fear out of the workplace. Yet, even in the healthiest of organizations, fear’s close cousin, anxiety, worms its way into our consciousness and governs how we process and react to the idea of change and each other. Skilled change leaders in the workplace understand this human reaction to new and different ideas and work hard to reduce the threat level when proposing something new.
Legacy beliefs exert a powerful force in our organizations and in our own lives. When those beliefs no longer match the external reality, our personal and business strategies come crashing down. Yet some leaders and professionals find a way to break away from the ties that bind.
There's a stark contrast between caretaker leaders focused on the status quo and leaders who lead in the face of adversity and the need to change. The latter use the firm's culture as a tool to enable change. They also draw upon these 11 key behaviors:
When we overweight the value of experience in hiring situations or in navigating strategy, we increase our risk of failure. The challenge we face as leaders and managers is to imbue ourselves and our cultures with a sense of curiosity and the means and confidence to experiment.
It's time for the July Leadership Development Round Table Challenge! You may recall from last month's inaugural event, this is where we put forth a vexing situation and a number of regular contributors plus one guest take the opportunity to share their best thoughts on how to handle it... in 200 words or less. You vote with your comments and with your actual vote, and after one week of fierce but professional debate, a winner is announced.
In some organizations, there are so many systemic and cultural disincentives to experimentation that it’s a wonder that executives and employees are able to decide what to have for lunch today that was different from yesterday. In spite of the natural inertia towards the sure thing or the shortcut (external advice in lieu of more risky and time-consuming experimentation), I’ll offer my few cents worth on why and how you and your firm can use experimentation as a means of building value and confounding competitors.
