As managers, it’s our sacred responsibility to create and continuously improve an environment that allows our people to do their best work. Few managers would disagree with their responsibility and accountability for creating this effective environment. Like breathing, it’s a good idea to invest time and energy in practices that promote a healthy, efficient and effective system. In reality, many firms do a good job on this in stable markets. However, when faced with the need to adapt or change due to market disruptions, too many firms struggle to change their system to support the pursuit of new. Here are 7 ideas to help managers avoid the most common mistakes as they venture forward into uncharted territory:
The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Introducing The Saturday Serial—An Ongoing Management & Leadership Case
Welcome to The Saturday Serial! This new series reflects my intent and attempt to share and cultivate management and leadership lessons beyond the format of a stale blog post and endless lists of “10 ideas to… .” While I love writing the Management Excellence blog and the first 1,025 posts are testament to my commitment, I’ve wanted to experiment with the serial and management fable format here for a long time. Beginning with my first episode, “Welcome to ACME John Anderson,” you will meet a growing cast of characters facing a series of very real management, leadership and career challenges in this fictional high-tech, global conglomerate and its various units and divisions. Enjoy!
Revisiting The 5 Priceless Lessons from Amundsen and Scott
Given the recent storms and polar-like weather in the Midwest and Northeast, it seems fitting to revisit the priceless management and leadership lessons gleaned from Amundsen and Scott in their race to 90-degrees south. These lessons never grow cold!
Art of Managing—Steering Clear of Flail and Fail
Businesses of all sizes, shapes and ages run into rough patches. Rapid growth, disruptive competitors or technologies, regulatory changes or the end of the road for well-worn strategies are all potential culprits in the move from success to struggle. It’s critical at this point for a firm’s leaders and managers to react carefully and appropriately in this unfamiliar terrain or they risk moving quickly from flail to fail. They invite flailure. Here are 5 ideas to stem the tide when the flailing starts:
In Pursuit of Senior Management Team Cohesion
In the most recent post in this series, I emphasized the importance of carefully cultivating senior management team chemistry …particularly when it comes to neutralizing the impact of toxic participants. However, even with the positive situation of a ph-neutral group of senior leaders (including the CEO) at the management team roundtable, there’s still no guarantee of high performance. As we shift away from the issue of toxicity (a deal-killer for team performance) and move towards cultivating high performance at the senior management group level, the ideas of team cohesion and team attraction come into play. Here are 5 ideas to help you begin to promote team cohesion:
The Sticky Topics of Senior Management Team Chemistry & Performance
The use of the word “team” to reference the collection of a firm’s senior leaders is generous at best and fallacious in many cases. Senior managers don’t necessarily gel as a team and perhaps a more accurate description of them in the context of a group might be that they are a collection of intelligent, successful functional leaders who occasionally come together and tolerate each other for a few hours of collegial discussion. Here are a number of ideas to get the toxicity out and the performance up:
Art of Managing—Moving Beyond A Failure to Execute
Resolving the failure to execute problem is much more like a long-term fitness program than a quick weight-loss diet. It involves changing the thinking about what’s most important for organizational health and success and doing the hard work of developing new habits that support continuous improvement. Here are 7 ideas to help you begin developing some healthy new habits:
Art of Managing—Don’t Set Artificial Limits on Employee Involvement
A firm’s senior leaders and managers are supposed to feel the weight of responsibility for the health of their organization. It comes with the job. However, no one suggested they bear the weight of the worries or the burden of finding the solutions in silence and without ample support from the broader employee population. Here are 6 ideas to help you jump-start improved employee involvement in strengthening your business:
Art of Managing—Beware the Lure of Strategy in a Box Approaches
Strategy is one of those difficult topics that dog most management teams and most firms. The real work of strategy is challenging, time consuming and filled with hard-to-answer questions. Given the challenges of managing an effective, on-going strategy process, it’s no surprise “Strategy in a Box” approaches are often adopted by management teams looking to add a check mark to the strategy task on their annual goals. Here are some key reasons why there are no shortcuts when it comes to strategy:
Leadership Caffeine™—In Praise of Mistakes Made for the Right Reasons
Show me a mistake-free leader, and I’ll show you someone hiding from the real issues confronting the business: people and strategy.
