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.
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.
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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.
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According to the Deb Nelson and Mark Albion’s research, successful leadership depends on three essential leadership practices: leading more like a monk, an architect, and a diplomat.
As monks, leaders become more mindful of their leadership role in the company and their impact on people; as architects, they spend most of their time on the immeasurable process known as company culture; and as diplomats, they become expert collaborators inside and outside of their organizations. Let’s look more closely at these three transitions critical to leading for scale.
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Increasing personal productivity is not just about doing more with less. It's about ensuring that what gets done actually needs to be done efficiently.
For most businesses, the fall ahead is intense, daunting, and demanding. Many leaders are concerned about the economy and how their companies will hold up if things do get worse. Add to all that the digital demands of the world we now inhabit. Armed with ever more ways to connect with each other, and to stay current in every moment, we often are not sure where to put our focus. We find it harder to give all of our attention to anything — or anyone — for very long.
Read more...Effective listening may be the most crucial skill for managers because it is required to do it so often. Unfortunately, listening also may be the most difficult skill to master.
Effective listening is challenging, in part, because people often are more focused on what they're saying than on what they're hearing in return. According to a recent study by the Harvard Business Review, people think the voice mail they send is more important than the voice mail they receive. Generally, senders think that their message is more helpful and urgent than do the people who receive it.
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