Every high performance team I’ve experienced as a participant, a sponsor or an outside advisor, was governed by an overarching set of principles or values that formed and framed the culture. And while good words alone don’t create success, the combination of the leaders and participants living and acting according to those words everyday made things work.
We’re often too quick as leaders to throw in the towel on teams that have whiffed. That’s a mistake that may be more costly to performance and morale than the initial and temporary failure. Here are 5 signs that your failed team merits more time:
Few would argue that a nimble, quick-to-learn and quick-to-adapt organization is a bad thing. Given the rate of change in our world, those characteristics are increasingly table-stakes for survival and success. Why then has the approach to strategy and the notion of “strategic planning” in so many organizations remained mired in a 1960’s kind of static, top-down event-focused model? Here are six ideas to transform your organization's approach to and effectiveness with strategy.
Want to know where to find your best and brightest emerging leaders? Here’s a hint, you’ll have to use your peripheral vision to see them, because they are moving sideways at a high rate of speed. Here are 7 ideas for cultivating Informal Leaders in your organization.
Your decisions define you as a leader and a manager, yet we spend very little time in our busy lives finding ways to improve our abilities in this area. This Management Excellence Toolkit Series will help you recognize the challenges and pitfalls of individual and group decision-making and offer ideas on improving performance for you and your co-workers. In this segment, I focus on the issues surrounding forecasting and estimating errors, and I offer a number of ideas to improve performance for these important activities.
As a long-time, self-described zealot for the importance of project managers developing as leaders, imagine how excited I was to learn about a conference devoted to just this topic! I’ve written at length in this blog (Learning to Lead in the Project Focused World and others) and even offered up my e-book, Leadership and the Project Manager, in support of this concept. I’m even more excited to be a part of the conference as a guest keynote as Project Leadership Forum kicks-off on Thursday in Harrisburg, PA.
Management and Career Miscellany on the Lighter Side-a brief collection of anecdotes and personal perspectives on decision-making, project management, social networking. Oh, and some amusing and really bad career advice to ignore if you hear it.
The rise of “the project” as an important means of competing and creating value has profound implications for those in leadership roles. Unfortunately, in many cases, the evolution in leadership practices has not kept pace with the needs of project teams or the needs of organizations struggling to develop competence at executing on projects.
Project inflation…the spread of too many projects and the heaping of them upon the tormented and torn few is a formula for disaster. Unfortunately, work force reductions and pressures to reduce costs, improve processes and to innovate all fuel project inflation. Consider adopting a rigorous approach to project selection by asking and answering these following questions:
Get your team talking about the right topics and get them focused on assessing and comparing based on the criteria that are the most important to your success. Skip the summer strategy offsite and start the dialogue on determining what’s truly important, and you’ll find yourself and your organization moving and working the right things faster than you might imagine.
