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.
How to distinguish yourself from the competition to be sure you have a preferred place in your target customer's mind. You know who you are. But do your customers? Are you who you were last year? If not, have you communicated how you've changed?
Positioning is the process of distinguishing yourself from competitors in specific ways in order to be the preferred provider for certain market segments. It's the act of designing your company's offer and image so it occupies a distinct and valued place in the targeted customer's mind. The main benefit of clear positioning is that it controls how the market perceives you and helps make your products and/or services more attractive.
Read more...When too many people in a company lack collaborative skills there is a very low trust, high blame, un-supportive workplace. People are less open, so it is more difficult to solve problems. They avoid risk taking because if anything goes wrong someone will get blamed.
When IBM was picking their next generation of leaders, all the people they picked had a skill that IBM called "collaborative influence." It's the ability to get people to do things when you don't control their salary; i.e., they do so simply because you have a good relationship. When Bell Labs looked closely at the difference between their good employees and the real stars, they found that the stars were adept at building collaborative networks. They knew who they could call when they had a problem. Other people were willing to help out because of the relationships that had been built.
Read more...
Although successful managers must have the attributes of a great leader, by themselves these attributes are not enough. Many great leaders still do not build successful organizations.
Non-profits that deliver great results over time are best positioned to survive, grow, and have an impact. Non profits that perform poorly, on the other hand, end up irrelevant or even as failures. And non profits that perform merely satisfactorily are vulnerable to shifts in the funding climate or the political environment.
Read more...The question we face now is how the working consciousness of current and future employees will be further transformed in the age of technology and globalization. What is inevitable is that work will change dramatically and the workforce will be employed in ways we can hardly imagine.
The past six generations have experienced the most rapid and profound change mankind has experienced in its 5,000 years of recorded history. If the world economy continues to grow at the same pace as the last half-century, in 2050 the world will be seven times richer than it is today, world population could be over 9 billion and average wealth will also have increased dramatically.
Read more...
When social entrepreneurs understand their strengths and priorities, and develop a leadership team composed of people with disparate and complementary skills, it creates “the perfect combination.”
According to Chantal Laurie Below and Kimberly Dasher Tripp, from Stanford University, there are five essential leadership roles in an organization that is ready to scale up. These roles may or may not be filled by five separate people; in some cases multiple roles can be filled by one person. The five roles are the evangelist, scaling partner, connector, program strategist, and realist.
Read more...