It’s a great vote of confidence when your boss picks you to lead the turnaround of a struggling team or function. You’re the management fixer, charged with figuring out what’s not working and how to fix it. And while this is a great career opportunity, there are a number of ways you can misfire in this role. This article offers 7 hard won ideas to help you make the best of a team or function turnaround opportunity.
For individuals involved in the world of design and design thinking, reframing vexing problems is a standard part of the process. For the rest of us, a bit of design thinking focused on reframing is invaluable in our daily labors. Here are some ideas to help you jump-start your reframing activities in pursuit of better solutions in the workplace:
We spend a great deal of time in our organizations striving to reduce risk and uncertainty. For some tasks that’s possible, but for the big issues of strategies and market forces, it’s impossible to bend behaviors and responses to fit our scripts. Effective leaders understand they must build teams that recognize uncertainty as opportunity and live to excel in those moments.
Challenging workplace conversations and even confrontations are inevitable. The key is to be at your best when many might be at their worst. Learn to tie these three together—own your message, manage yourself in the moment, and practice positive persuasion—and you have a bright communication future in front of you.
I fret over feedback poorly provided. I also recognize that not all feedback is worth listening to—a great deal depends upon the source and the motivations of the feedback giver. However, I worry a great deal about the incredible and immeasurable cost of important feedback never given. As Deming suggests, this value is unknown and unknowable. And that worries me.
It’s no secret that top leaders and their management teams struggle with strategy. After all, choosing a direction, saying “no” to other opportunities and then creating a blueprint for organization-wide involvement is one of the most difficult challenges of organizational life. This challenge is made easier however, when leadership ensures all employees have the opportunity to internalize and develop an emotional connection to the strategy.
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:
There are few activities in your management career that offer the high return-on-time-invested (ROTI) than actively engaging and supporting your newly promoted first-time managers. Here are four essential activities to help guide your efforts
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.
Before saying “no” to that messy situation, recognize that the mess is the opportunity. Being invited to fix a messy situation is like receiving an engraved invitation to success on a silver platter.
