Corporate culture changes only when people change. I’m coaching a senior leader through his company’s culture change. He recently told me, “Man, this culture management is hard work!” We both laughed — and agreed. It takes time and energy to tend, monitor, and nurture a safe, inspiring work environment in your organization’s divisions and teams. Safe, inspiring work environments do not happen by chance. Human foibles and temptations, driven by greed and power, can make companies lousy places to work.
Only when leaders proactively manage productivity and citizenship do organizations enjoy their desired high performance, values-aligned culture. Many senior leaders believe that they only have to describe desired outcomes and people will immediately align to them. Think of the last organizational initiative introduced in your company. The concept of perfection exists in our workplaces. Frontline employees do what the company culture reinforces, whether that’s great performance or not-so-great (things are “perfect”). New Leader Tuesday-At Least 11 More Ideas to Help You Run Effective Meetings.
Having fulfilled my lifetime quota of attendance at poorly run meetings, I’ve developed a bit of a crusade mentality to guide others on how to run these sessions effectively. This is a follow-on to a recent piece in my New Leader Tuesday series, entitled: 15 Ideas to Help You Tame the Meeting Beast. Here are my latest top 11 ideas for taming the meeting beast and actually getting something out of these infernal sessions. Readers, if you have some more ideas, tack on your contributions here and we’ll all be a bit wiser. At Least 11 Ideas to Help You Run Effective Meetings: 1. The most important rule: don’t call a meeting unless you absolutely have no other choice. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
The Bottom-Line for Now: You’ll rarely see or hear the words: “good” and “meeting” next to each other in the same sentence. New Leader Tuesday-15 Ideas to Help You Tame the Meeting Beast. New Leader Tuesday at Management Excellence The New Leader’s Series here at Management Excellence, is dedicated to the proposition that one of the most valuable things we can do is support the development of the next generation of leaders on our teams and in our organizations. Meetings are interesting beasts to deal with as a new leader. Some (OK, very few) are incredibly productive and many (most) are gigantic and misdirected time sinks. Here are some ideas on optimizing your use of meetings. 15 Ideas to Help You Develop Effective Meeting Habits: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
The Bottom-Line for Now: The right meeting with the right approach at the right time run the right way can be a valuable event. For readers with experience making meetings more effective, please add to the list! Rules for Assuring Poor Performance. In 1773 Benjamin Franklin, one of the USA's founding fathers, wrote a pamphlet aimed at the royalty of England titled Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One. Satire is one way to get your point across. I apply my own style of satire here to appeal to organizations to cease their hesitation and skepticism and embrace the benefits of applying business analytics and enterprise performance management. I apologize in advance if I offend anyone, but sometimes there is truth in humor. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Imagine I took over the management of a poorly performing organization and wanted to keep it that way.
First, I would ensure that all of the managers and employees are totally ignorant of the executive team's strategy. I have recently heard about this new trend of “business analytics.” Next, I would avoid holding anyone accountable. I would freeze our managerial accounting system to remain in its archaic state. Three Reasons Why Leaders Fail « Leaders to Leader. It is unrealistic to expect that all forms of leadership are successful—because they are not.
The nature of leadership is such that leaders are going to take risks and fail. An effective leader learns from failure and moves forward. However, there are failures in leadership not associated with risk taking that can undermine and paralyze an organization. With any leadership failure, one must strive to distill the reasons and causes behind it. Such failures prevent leaders and their organizations from moving forward because the subsequent barriers and voids stifle a company’s ability to seek new opportunities. Consequently, the company will not be able to take advantage of situations that increase its competitiveness, productivity and market strength. Everyone in the organization feels the effects of failure. It is important for leaders to understand that their knowledge, expertise and leadership skills will be continually challenged in a volatile and complex work environment. Timothy F. Be a meeting whisperer: Conflict Management 101.
A simple reality of the working world is that meetings dominate our time, and the higher you go in your career, the more pressure there is to spend every waking moment in a meeting somewhere. I think we should cancel most of the meetings we attend, but what about the ones where you need to be present? What’s the most effective way to spend your energy? In my consulting and coaching practice, I spend a lot of time facilitating executive meetings and board retreats. This causes me to constantly refine my awareness of meeting dynamics and how I can most effectively manage them — and coach my clients into doing the same. I do a really good job, but I have to come clean and tell you I have a secret sauce and that you can buy it at a bookstore.
“The PRIMES,” by Chris McGoff, is a lot more than a meeting-management book. Secrets to conflict management Sometimes, people in meetings get stuck, talking at one another. You can do this effectively by drawing out the Big Hat-Little Hat PRIME. Leading in the 21st century - McKinsey Quarterly - Governance - Leadership. It is often said that the principles of great leadership are timeless, or based on immutable truths.
But when we meet with the men and women who run the world’s largest organizations, what we hear with increasing frequency is how different everything feels from just a decade ago. Leaders tell us they are operating in a bewildering new environment in which little is certain, the tempo is quicker, and the dynamics are more complex. They worry that it is impossible for chief executives to stay on top of all the things they need to know to do their job. Some admit they feel overwhelmed. To understand the leadership challenge of our volatile, globalized, hyperconnected age more clearly, we recently initiated a series of structured interviews with the leaders of some of the world’s largest and most vibrant organizations.
After presenting the ideas of these leaders on leadership, we offer a few additional reflections on the topic. Leading in an age of upheaval I’m pretty energetic. 1. 2. Moving from managing to leading -- taking on the big picture. Moving from managing to leading is a challenge because the skills that make you a good manager aren’t enough to help you excel in leadership positions. Men and women alike sometimes perceive the gap between managing and leading to be a “glass ceiling” when, in many cases, it’s not necessarily that at all; it’s a subtle group of skills you must have to be considered for leadership. Many people who make it into leadership, even the ones who don’t appear to deserve it, have mastered skills that don’t show up on a traditional resume. They have built a strong Invisible Resume that helps them get into — and succeed — in the executive and C-suite ranks.
In this three-part video series, I’ll cover several diverse aspects of your Invisible Leadership Resume, your global perspective, your leadership presence and your authentic leadership style. Part I: To be a leader, you must get out of the weeds. 10 Ways to Motivate Anyone. I am often asked about how I keep employees inspired and productive. It's an essential question since companies today must accomplish more, with fewer people. The most successful start-ups must be lean, nimble, and fierce. In a nutshell, you should hire bright, energetic, innovative employees. Then offer them the right incentives--the ones that will impact their personal brain and personality types--to keep them mentally and emotionally invested in doing their best. It's impossible to talk about motivation without mentioning Drive, a book by best-selling author Daniel Pink.
Pink believes Google's "20% time," in which employees may spend one day a week on whatever they want is a shining example of how allowing intrinsically-based motivations (a sense of accomplishment or purpose) can flourish. There's no question that intrinsic motivation is essential. That said, there is no cookie-cutter approach to motivating your people. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Write Less, Say More: The Power of Brevity. 33inShare100 There is a common misconception when it comes to writing that is professional in nature that a person must write in a verbose manner to come across as intelligent. I am sorry.
Let me do that again. People often make a mistake in thinking that writing long-winded sentences with big words makes them appear smart. Actually, let me try this one more time. You don’t need to write a lot or use big words to sound smart. Now, that’s better. Too often, people write sentences like the one at the top when they should choose version #3.
In the real world, most people don’t enjoy reading cover letters, resumes and presentations. When you write with brevity, you make your points quickly and shrewdly. The secret to brevity (and, in turn, clarity) is something we are rarely taught growing up and may appear anathema to a professor of English lit: Write like you are talking to a friend. I don’t mean write in Internet jargon or shorthand. Let’s use the examples from the top. The before: The after: