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 »As you look back over the past year and forward to 2011, schedule time to get your team re-energized and re-focused when you get back to work in January. Here are a few ways to do it: Summarize Your 2010 Accomplishments – this can be done as an “Annual Report” with photos, graphs, video clips, […]
Read post »My last blog post looked at using the Holiday Season as a reminder of the importance of reviewing, assessing, celebrating, and refocusing – both at home and at work. Besides energizing us, it’s critical to our ongoing learning and development. In offsite retreats and workshops, management teams agree on how critically important it is for […]
Read post »As we scurry madly into the Holiday Season, the year-end retrospectives are beginning. It’s time to look back on what was and ahead to what can be. This is also what highly effective – and disciplined – management teams do so much more regularly that their mediocre peers. Many management teams have a limited or […]
Read post »My last post reported on fascinating research from the world of honey bees providing profound and practical insights on building highly effective teams. Team effectiveness depends heavily on the team leadership skills of the person heading up the team. Here’s a look at recent and emerging research on team leadership for stronger team building. “Great […]
Read post »Management is about facts, analysis, and issues of the head. Leadership is about intuition, values, and issues of the heart. Logic is the language of management. Imagery is the language of leadership. Imagery is fuelled by metaphors, parables, analogies, stories, and examples. It’s how we’ve learned from each other and passed along our accumulated experiences […]
Read post »With the Chilean miners successful rescue last month, the questions around how they became trapped in the first place will lead to numerous investigative media reports and inquiries. Those stories, reports, and inquires are now emerging around the giant BP oil disaster this spring and summer in the Gulf of Mexico. Early stories and reports […]
Read post »This fall we’re deep in the thick of helping a number of Clients plan and execute extensive multi-year implementations of leadership and culture development processes to dramatically boost customer service, product/service quality, safety, employee engagement, succession planning, efficiencies, and another key elements of organization effectiveness. Since leadership and culture development are clearly people issues, we […]
Read post »We are working with four executive teams this fall who are looking to implement major new initiatives aimed at dramatically shifting their organizational culture and performance. One is a large international retailer completely revamping their entire supply chain process. Another is a major global mining company determined to dramatically boost their safety performance. A mid-sized […]
Read post »Many of this month’s blog posts have been around improving the rampant levels of declining customer service levels in most organizations. Managers often point to frontline servers attitudes as the source of the problem and look for quick motivational or training fixes. But who hired the servers? Who trains them? Who provides the systems and […]
Read post »A television producer called me recently to discuss a story she’s working on around declining customer service levels and what to do about it. We agreed that there’s been a big drop in customer service over the past two years. I believe this problem is rooted in three common causes: Misuse of Technology – forcing […]
Read post »A long term Client sent me an e-mail looking for advice on how to best position his expertise for a new position he is pursuing: “What would you say are the major differences between the strategies to support service excellence in a retail environment with fixed locations/employees (i.e, McDonalds) versus a service company with technicians […]
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 »Continuing the focus on team building from my last two blog posts, here are further approaches to strengthen your team – as a leader or as a member: a) Be careful of team building exercises that promote “teaminess” as an end in itself. Lasting teamwork comes from getting everyone focused on the issues outlined in […]
Read post »Strong leaders – whether in appointed roles or taking leadership action – build highly effective teams. Where teams have been effectively organized and led, the list of team outcomes have led to dramatic improvements in productivity, customer service, quality, process management, innovation, cost effectiveness, job satisfaction, morale, and financial performance. My last blog post looked […]
Read post »Growing appreciation for the power of teams and teamwork has created an explosion in team talk. But many so-called teams aren’t teams. Most are organizational units, committees, or task forces that have been grouped together. The team problem generally starts at the top. Many management groups leading a corporation, division, department, or branch often has […]
Read post »My last blog post discussed Dan Tobin’s new book on building a leadership development program. His first chapter deals with identifying your organization’s high-potential talent. Once high potential people are identified, the next question often is whether to tell those rising stars that they’ve been flagged as such and will be developed further. In their […]
Read post »Are many of your key managers and executives well into their fifties or beyond? Are you concerned about developing your organization’s next generation of leaders? Is succession planning a growing issue as you look ahead a few years? Could lack of “leadership bench strength” constrain your organization’s growth? A key element in top performing organization’s […]
Read post »How healthy is your workplace? Are you helping to energize or enervate the people you work with? With constant change and the relentless pressures of today’s 24/7 work world, stress is taking a heavy toll. A national opinion poll by the American Psychological Association found that “two-thirds of both men and women say work has […]
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