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Tagged with 'organization change'

How Your Leadership Team Can Slow Down to Speed Up

An old fable tells of a farmer with a wagon brimming full of cabbage heading to a new market. He stops for directions and asks, “How far is it to the market?” The man replies, “It’s about an hour if you go slowly. But if you rush, it will take all day.” It was a […]

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Are You and Your Team on the Bleeding or Leading Edge?

Is your team/organization overloaded with many priorities and conflicting activities? Does your team/organization load new projects and goals on top of existing workloads without rigorous “stop doing” pruning to make room for them? These are the two biggest problems emerging over the last few months of work with our Strategic Use of Time Assessment. The […]

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The Key to Organizational Agility is Leadership Speed

Do you feel like you’re expected to move faster and do more? Are you often frustrated that your organization moves too slow and gets stalled? If your organization were to move faster, would it substantially influence your success? These questions were recently asked in a Zenger Folkman survey on agility and leadership speed. Agreement with […]

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Same Old Approaches = Same Old Results

Our organizations desperately want and need much stronger leadership and coaching at all levels. But most organizations aren’t significantly improving employee engagement, customer satisfaction, attracting and retaining top talent, succession planning, increasing health and safety, or energizing organization culture. Traditional leadership and coaching skill development methods are producing very little behavior change. Current approaches are […]

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Are Urgent Operational Issues Crowding Out Your Strategic Effectiveness?

There are many reasons leadership teams allow their priorities to be badly distorted. Things that matter most — team dynamics, key strategic priorities, and organization change and development efforts — are often crowded out by things that matter least — the crisis du jour or technical problems better solved by those closest to the action. […]

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Forget Forecasts and Predictions, Build an Agile Organization

A couple goes to a fair, where there’s a large, impressive-looking machine. The husband puts in a coin and receives a card telling him his age and what kind of person he is. He reads it and gets excited. It says: “You’re brilliant and charming. Women fall all over you.” His wife grabs the card […]

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Making People Stronger for Organizations and Organizations Stronger for People

Decades of research shows that many leadership development programs have little impact on creating lasting behavior change. Sometimes called “spray and pray” or “sheep dipping,” many efforts provide one-off learning or development events in the hope that something will stick. With weak follow through and little connection to daily work life it rarely does. Decades […]

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IBM Study Shows Why Only 20% of Change Efforts Are Highly Successful

Recently I’ve been reviewing our lessons learned on organization and culture development. This is in preparation for our June 17 webinar on Leading a Peak Performance Culture. “Making Change Work … while the Work Keeps Changing” is a new research report from IBM summarizing interviews and online surveys they conducted of over 1,400 leaders responsible […]

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Coaching Survey: Big Need for Skill, Feedback, and Measurement

My last blog reported on our Building Extraordinary Coaching Skills webcast  where I outlined 6 Steps to Building a Coaching Culture with Exceptional Leaders. During the webcast more than 80% of the over 500 participating sites completed a series of six surveys on the state of coaching and coaching skill development in their organization. My […]

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Is Your Culture Anchored in Strengths or Weaknesses?

Most organizations we’re working with today have declared a set of values. Posters, slides, banners, screen savers, newsletters, flyers, and framed parchments proclaim what the organization stands for. Many of these values statements assert a commitment to excellence, respect and integrity, customer focus, teamwork and collaboration, service/quality, responsiveness and the like. This is an important […]

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Building Organizational Muscle: Why Building Strengths Pay Greater Dividends than Fixing Weaknesses

Last week I met with an HR VP to discuss lifting organizational performance through leadership and culture development. The company was doing well and growing through a few strategic acquisitions. Levels of customer satisfaction, service/quality, safety, productivity, and profits were good but not great. He and the senior team were looking for ways to boost […]

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9 Ways to Get Over Your Feedback Fears

Canadian Thanksgiving Day was earlier this month. That holiday Monday was cool with bright sunshine and blue skies. After our traditional Oktoberfest Family Day lunch (Kitchener-Waterloo celebrates their German heritage with the largest Oktoberfest outside of Munich) our family decided to visit a corn maze. It consisted of a series of trails and pathways cut […]

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Manifesto for a Leadership Development Revolution

I’ve been delivering keynotes, webinars, facilitating workshops, and discussing our Strengths-Based Leadership Development System for the past month with many highly experienced HR, Learning, and OD executives. It’s been fascinating to see most of them go through the same struggle I did when I first dug into the compelling research. On the one hand, comments […]

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Leadership Matters – We Must Build Capacity

Leadership is fast resembling the famous Mark Twain quote about the weather – everybody’s always talking about it but nobody does anything about it. Based on their ongoing research, The Conference Board of Canada concludes, “Building leadership capacity has been a top priority for several years, at least on paper. The problem is that, while […]

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Six Core Values of Organization Development

Over the years that I have been writing The Leader Letter, culture and organization development emerged as a core theme. One of the early OD works was a 640 page text book written by Newton Margulies and Anthony P. Raia entitled Organizational Development: Values, Process, and Technology. On page three they outline these core values […]

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Use This 10 Point Checklist for a Leadership Check Up

Use this checklist as a “time out” to reflect on your leadership strengths and gaps. When faced with wrenching changes, setbacks, and difficulties do you generally Lead, Follow, or Wallow? What would your team say? How do you know? What percent of your time are you now spending on Technical (applying your expertise and solving […]

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Is There a Place for Ego in Effective Leadership?

A few months ago I posted a blog on “What’s Your Me/We Ratio? based on a salient observation made by Donald Cooper in his newsletter about managers’ use of “I” and “my,” rather than “we” and “our.” They seem to live by the American pop music star Madonna’s creed: “everyone is entitled to my opinion.” […]

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Study Shows Power of Leadership Behaviors Supported by Management Systems and Processes

A new study was recently published by the global management consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In partnership with 12 worldwide management organizations like The Conference Board, American Management Association, the Chartered Management Institute and others in Europe, Asia, and other countries, the survey sought input from 1,600 senior executives on 20 organizational capabilities. This […]

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Top Reasons Cultural Transformations Fail

Our Linked 2 Leadership group on LinkedIn (connect with me at http://ca.linkedin.com/in/jimclemmer) is having a lively and insightful discussion on the question, “What are the top reasons why cultural transformations fail?” Since the failure rate of organizational change efforts like health and safety, quality, productivity, innovation, customer service, morale/engagement, teamwork, or public sector renewal is […]

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Calling All Leaders

On March 7 (tomorrow), 1876 Alexander Graham Bell was issued a patent by the U.S. Patent Office for “the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically …  by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound.” The telephone was first seen […]

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