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:
I’ve long been a student of the values that organizations espouse. They are after all an attempt to encapsulate the accepted and aspirational behaviors of the firm’s employees and officers. And while words on the wall or in the placard are typically interesting, noble and even somewhat predictable, what’s truly fascinating is to compare and contrast the behaviors of people in an organization to the values statements hanging on the wall. Sadly, in too many organizations, the values statements are corporate furniture. Here are some thoughts on how you can help bring your firm's values to life and strengthen performance in the process:
For some reason, the work of management and of managers often is positioned as a poor second cousin to the richer, nobler tasks of leading. That's a false perspective. Good managers with good leadership skills are incredibly valuable to today's organizations. Here are a few reasons why you should be proud of your important role as a manager:
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:
In the most successful firms I’ve been around, the managers actively promote experimentation and learning as core to everyone’s job. Yet, it’s not the words on the wall or even the words that come out of their mouths about experimentation, it’s the actions they take when things go horribly wrong that fosters the effective learning environment. Here are 3 counter-intuitive ideas for turning project failures into lessons learned that stick:
The author builds a case for shifting away from the competency model (core skills and experiences) that has dominated hiring practices for the recent past, to one that emphasizes assessing a candidate’s potential in the form of, “the ability to adapt to ever-changing business environments and grow into challenging new roles.”
I’ve encountered more than a few managers who have expressed frustration over the pace of development of someone they have marked for future advancement and increased contribution. For many of these managers, it’s a vexing dilemma with no clear solution. Here are 4 ideas to help you navigate this potentially sticky situation:
Many workplace teams I observe are not much better than the typical nightmarish college class group project that most of us have lived through at one time or another. Here are 4 big reasons why workplace teams struggle and 9 ideas to help you do something about it:
Today’s management literature is filled with references to speed. If we’re following the trends, we’re all growing more “agile” and likely “lean” in the process. We’re working in “sprints” and “bursts,” and of course, we’re “teaming” whenever possible. All of this motion may be helping our waistlines, dancing moves and cardio health, but I’m not convinced that speed is always the right answer. Sometimes you just have to slow down to go faster. Here are 4 key situations where pausing before acting makes good business sense:
One of the value killers found inside many organizations is the out of control pursuit of too many new initiatives. The root cause of this undisciplined pursuit of new initiatives rests squarely on the collective shoulders of the management team.
