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:
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.
Great management teams are hungry to win in the moment and relentless at building for the future. It takes discipline and deliberate efforts to separate the here and now from an imagined but uncertain future—yet success over time demands this effort and discipline. Here are four big behaviors of management teams succeeding today while fighting hard for a great future:
When you’re struggling to create clarity on an important topic or navigating a heated group discussion, it pays to stop talking and start drawing. This sudden shift in medium takes the negative energy out of discussion and focuses your audience on designing a way forward. Here are 7 tips to help you get to the whiteboard in pursuit of communication clarity:
Great workplace communicators are tuned-in to the power of their communication superpowers and they deliberately deploy them in pursuit of individual, team, and organizational success. In this article, I share four powerful communication tactics you can use to melt the resistance of workplace blockers and gain support for your initiatives.
There are few activities in our organizations more important than developing emerging leaders. A healthy, full pipeline of leadership talent is essential to sustain success and navigate a complex world. The Foundation + 4 Pillars framework helps guide managers in pursuit of this critical work.
Leaders too often exist in a bubble of their own creation. They view their actions and utterances through their own filters and fail to take into account how they are perceived by others. Objects staring back at you in the mirror are not always as they appear.
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. Ideas are the engines of innovation, yet too often they are visible for just a flash of time. In reality, we need ways to curate and develop ideas. Try building an idea lab. All you need to get started is a few spare walls, some low-cost materials and some starter ideas! Just be careful, as you may very well change your firm’s future in the process.
