Leadership, competitiveness and best practices on business management
Workplace Survey, Findings 1.Workers are struggling to work effectively. When focus is compromised in pursuit of Collaboration, neither works well. 2. Effective workplaces balance focus and collaboration. Workplaces designed to enable collaboration without sacrificing employees’ ability to focus are more successful. 3. Choice drives performance and innovation. Employers who provide a spectrum of choices for when and where to work are seen as more innovative and have higher-performing employees.
In the most effective teams in organizations, people fight with each other. As the boss, is it your job to try to stop that? No, quite the contrary: Creating conditions where people feel safe to fight is a hallmark of the greatest bosses.
Brad Bird is the Academy Award-winning director from Pixar who worked on both The Incredibles and Ratatouille. When he was interviewed for McKinsey Quarterly, he continually emphasized how the success of these two films depended on constant and constructive battles. Bird had his own passionate opinions, and he realized that everyone who really cared about the success of the project did, too. As the director, he understood that a big part of his job was to create enough trust so people could fight over decisions big and small.
Read more...Too often managers come up with great “solutions” but when applied it doesn’t really solve the problem. One of the most common mistakes managers make trying to solve a problem is ask the wrong question. Great answers, but wrong questions
Hudson Guild is one of the oldest and largest non profit organizations operating in the Chelsea area of Manhattan in New York City. With a “collaborative community building” approach, Hudson Guild is committed to addressing common interests and needs based on social shared values. For more than 100 years, they work to make more accessible information, skills and opportunities to learn and grow to community members creating and strengthening “the social fabric that binds a community and enable its members to succeed in both good and bad times.”
Read more...Creating context — on a regular basis — is a critical part of every manager's job and could be considered a core competency of leadership. Without it, you might find yourself ahead of schedule, but not sure where you are heading.
There's an old story about an airplane pilot who announces to his passengers that he has good news and bad news: the good news is that they are ahead of schedule; the bad news is that he doesn't know where they are heading. Sounds ridiculous for an airline — but it's common for organizations. All too often people are asked to work extremely hard without fully understanding how their tasks steer their organization in a strategic direction. Often invisible, this pattern is what I call "lack of context," and it's one of the most pernicious causes of unnecessary complexity and frustration in organizations.
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Is leadership superfluous in a self-managing team? Aren’t self-managing teams supposed to be self-sustaining and self-sufficient?
Self-managing work teams are linked solidly with empowerment. In some organizations, "empowerment" is the umbrella term for increasing employee involvement in decision-making using self-managed work teams. Actually, empowerment should be more than simple involvement; it should mean allowing employees to make decisions themselves. Thus, employee empowerment is the concept of subordinates having the authority and capacity to make decisions and act for the organization so that individual motivation and organizational productivity are improved. Some experts associate this to a mathematical function with four variables: authority, resources, information, and accountability. All the variables must be integrated and offered, or the task of empowerment becomes void.
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Conventional wisdom says that scaling social innovation starts with strengthening internal management capabilities. However, real social change happens when organizations go outside their own walls and find creative ways to enlist the help of others
High impact nonprofits have mastered several basic management principles that are necessary to sustain their impact. These nonprofits are not so much ideological as they are focused on achieving greater impact. Here are three best practices that high impact nonprofits have mastered in order to achieve their goals.
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