Has your executive or management team fallen into a few of the traps identified in my last blog post? If so, you’re in good company. Those common team traps are highly interconnected. Getting out of them takes a fair bit of work and approaches unique to each team. Following is a menu of resources and […]
Read post »In the last few months I’ve been working with three executive teams to help strengthen team effectiveness and boost their leadership of major culture change and development efforts. One team heads up a large commercial construction company in Western Canada, another is a European based international mining company, and the third are senior partners in […]
Read post »Change is happening way too fast to predict and plan for an uncertain and unknown future. Building a quickly responsive and highly adaptive team and organizational culture is more critical than ever. The core of a built-to-change culture is an energized vision, values, and purpose/mission (it’s the hub of our “Leadership Wheel”) brimming with life […]
Read post »My last post brought a few insights and research on dealing with uncertainty. The post before that was built around Dan Gardner’s excellent new book, Future Babble. It drew parallels with one of his key themes (expert hedgehogs and foxes) by discussing management hedgehogs and leadership foxes. A key difference from management hedgehog’s rigid planning […]
Read post »My last blog post discussed some of the commitment confusion and challenges we see with many management teams we’re working with. Here are two key behaviors that send very loud, visual messages about managers’ true priorities: Visible, Felt Leadership or Remote Control Management Managers in high-performing organizations spend much more time “managing by wandering around” […]
Read post »This fall we’ve been working extensively with executive teams striving to transform their cultures to boost safety, customer service, quality, and leadership at all levels. I wrote about some of this work around our Commitment Continuum in an earlier blog post which was also published in our October issue of The Leader Letter (“Lasting Culture […]
Read post »My last blog post highlighted the big problem of a culture of fear within many teams and organizations. In the middle of preparing today’s post, I’m doing some fall clean up in my garden while listening to a radio panel discussion on the huge problem of medical errors. Fear of speaking up or admitting mistakes […]
Read post »A big city public transit system just released a report addressing its terrible service and image problems. While some of the panel’s recommendations deal with the organization’s culture, much of it is focused on “fixing” drivers, counter staff, and other frontline service people through training and “attitude change.” The way too common “fix our customer […]
Read post »Last month Return on Performance magazine asked me to respond to a series of questions on motivating employees to attract new customers in a recovering economy for their “Winning Tips” section. My responses below reflect many of the internal service and servant leadership themes found throughout my work – and this month’s issue. Ask yourself… […]
Read post »You probably spend large chunks of your day in meetings or on conference calls. That’s especially true if you’re in any sort of management, project, or team leadership role. Whether in person or using communication technology, meetings, conferences calls, or webinars are more important than ever in our increasingly complex and interconnected world. Research clearly […]
Read post »There are very few strictly “health or safety problems.” But there are many leadership and organizational culture problems that show up in accidents, sickness, absenteeism, conflict, stress, and other symptoms of ineffectiveness. Like incompetent doctors, ineffective managers often make people sicker. Research shows that workers are three times more likely to experience accidents in a […]
Read post »I recently joined the LinkedIn group “HR – Organization Development & Training.” Eli Sopow, Special Advisor, Change Management at Royal Canadian Mounted Police, posted the question “can changing behavior change your organization culture?” It was a question at the heart of so much of The CLEMMER Group’s consulting and training work of the last years […]
Read post »Marcelino Sánchez added this comment to my blog posting last week on “Keys to Building a Strong Team or Organizational Culture:” “My thoughts on building a productive team culture (subculture). For a team to do what it needs to do in a way that they like to do it and be effective, they have to […]
Read post »Whether it’s across an entire organization or with a local team, culture change is a hot issue these days. For good reason; culture trumps strategy, structure, processes, or technology. We have long defined culture as “the way we do things around here.” A team or organizational culture heavily influences what’s acceptable and unacceptable behavior. And […]
Read post »Last week’s blog on Engage Younger Workers or Bore and Lose Them got me thinking further about how meetings most clearly showcase the organizational or even division/department’s mini-culture. I was running a two-day offsite planning retreat recently where the disconnect between the culture the leadership team wanted to build and their group behavior was huge. […]
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