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.
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.
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.
Read more...
Greatness has more to do with how nonprofits work outside the boundaries of their organizations than with how they manage their own internal operations.
To paraphrase Archimedes, “Give me a lever long enough and I alone can move the world.” Best organizations use the power of leverage to create change. In physics, leverage is defined as the mechanical advantage gained from using a lever. In business, it means using a proportionately small initial investment to gain a high return. The concept of leverage captures exactly what high-impact nonprofits do. Like a man lifting a boulder three times his weight with a lever and fulcrum, these nonprofits are able to achieve greater social change than their mere size or structure would suggest.
Read more...
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.
Read more...
Managers responsible for team performance often fall into one of two traps. Some continue to act like traditional bosses, telling the team what to do and how to do it. Others think they’re “empowering” the team by maintaining a hands-off policy; neither approach works.
According to the Professor J. Richard Hackman of Harvard University, the team success depends on four essential aspects: an appropriate balance of authority between the leader and his/her team; a continuing learning environment; clear performance goals and metrics and an adequate organizational support.
Read more...