Seven Rules for Managing Creative People - Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | 3:00 PM April 2, 2013 Moody, erratic, eccentric, and arrogant? Perhaps — but you can’t just get rid of them. In fact, unless you learn to get the best out of your creative employees, you will sooner or later end up filing for bankruptcy. Conversely, if you just hire and promote people who are friendly and easy to manage, your firm will be mediocre at best. Suppressed creativity is a malign organizational tumour. 1. 2. The solution, then, is to support your creatives with colleagues who are too conventional to challenge their ideas, but unconventional enough to collaborate with them. 3. As novelist John Irving said, “the reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me”. 4. 5. The moral of the story? 6. 7. A final caveat: even when you are able to manage your creative employees, it does not mean that you should let them manage others.
Must Have Resources on Teaching Online Safety Internet has become an integral part of our students learning. They use it for searching, connecting, socializing, and communicating.There is no way we can control what our students are doing online no matter how hard we try. It is funny when you enter a school and find that certain websites ( YouTube for instance ) is banned there. Why would students access YouTube through their schools desktops while they have their own mobile gadgets to use whenever and wherever they want. Students digital safety is not dependent on a strict ban of certain websites, it is rather an outcome of a fruitful and collaborative awareness process in which students take part in learning how to : be able to scrutinize the veracity of texts obtained via networks or online spaces that have very little to do with conventional ' information or truth criteria and everything to do with discursive understanding of how online practices work. Teaching online safety is not an easy task but it is not impossible.
Earn Your Leadership Role Every Day “My Trident is a symbol of honor and heritage. By wearing the Trident I accept the responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life. It is a privilege that I must earn every day.” -- Navy SEAL Creed Many entrepreneurs and small-business owners struggle with the transition from being the “visionary with a business plan” to the role of manager-leader. Here are six ways to earn your leadership role every day: Listen and get feedback. Motivate the team. Be disciplined. Always be learning. Lead and be led. Delegate properly. Capturing business value with social technologies - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy - Growth Social technologies, in their relatively brief period of existence, have found favor with consumers faster than previous technologies did. It took 13 years for commercial television to reach 50 million households and 3 years for Internet service providers to sign their 50 millionth subscriber. Facebook hit the 50 million–user mark in just a year and Twitter in nine months. Sweeping cultural, economic, and social changes have accompanied this accelerated pace of adoption by the world’s consumers. Companies, too, have adopted these technologies but have generated only a small fraction of the potential value they can create. An in-depth analysis of four industry sectors that represent almost 20 percent of global industry sales suggests that social platforms can unlock $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value in those sectors alone. Of late, some bearish sentiments surround social technologies after disappointments for several companies in the capital markets. Productivity possibilities
Hardest Leadership Skill You'll Ever Learn Any great leader faces a multitude of challenges every day. Whether it's communicating strategy, helping people through change, holding on to excellence in the face of compromise, or just navigating the leadership environment, there is no shortage of development opportunities lurking in each day's schedule. I've worked over the years with leaders on all of the challenges above--and many, many more. But surprisingly, the skill that I see more leaders struggle with more than any other is relatively mundane (but very important): the ability to work with their team as an equal. As we've seen before, many leaders can only operate in one of two modes--in charge, or not there. Truly great leaders have a third mode: The ability to sit with their team without needing to be in charge, using their subject matter knowledge just the same way as anyone else around the table would. If you don't already have it, here's how to develop that skill: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
How ‘social intelligence’ can guide decisions - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy - Strategic Thinking In many companies, marketers have been first movers in social media, tapping into it for insights on how consumers think and behave. As social technologies mature and organizations become convinced of their power, we believe they will take on a broader role: informing competitive strategy. In particular, social media should help companies overcome some limits of old-school intelligence gathering, which typically involves collecting information from a range of public and proprietary sources, distilling insights using time-tested analytic methods, and creating reports for internal company “clients” often “siloed” by function or business unit. Today, many people who have expert knowledge and shape perceptions about markets are freely exchanging data and viewpoints through social platforms. This isn’t to suggest that “social” will entirely displace current methods of intelligence gathering. Exhibit 1 Social media is changing the old-school intelligence cycle. Enlarge Exhibit 2 About the authors
Why Great CEOs are Unfair I recently read a study which estimated that 65 percent of employees do just the minimum to keep their job. 17 percent don't even do that much and don't really care if they lose their job. That leaves just 18 percent who are working hard. Of that number, only about half of them are good at what they do. That means your company is being carried into its success or failure on the backs of about 10 percent of your people. I can't vouch for the accuracy of this information, but what I can say is this: Your company has pacesetters who are faster, stronger, and more committed than the other employees. In the politically-correct, hyper-sensitive HR world of big companies, it often seems that the desire to be fair has created an attitude that opposes the idea of meritocracy. How to be Unfair 1. Do you have a system that measures contributions at the individual level? Jack Welch was famous at GE for the annual force-rank review of all employees. 2. 3.
What Is Leadership? What is leadership, anyway? Such a simple question, and yet it continues to vex popular consultants and lay people alike. I’ve now written several books on leadership for employee engagement, and yet it occurred to me that I never actually paused to define leadership. Let’s start with what leadership is not… Leadership has nothing to do with seniority or one’s position in the hierarchy of a company. Too many talk about a company’s leadership referring to the senior most executives in the organization. Leadership has nothing to do with titles. Leadership has nothing to do with personal attributes. Leadership isn’t management. So, again, what is Leadership? Let’s see how some of the most respected business thinkers of our time define leadership, and let’s consider what’s wrong with their definitions. Peter Drucker: “The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.” Really? Warren Bennis: “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”