299 Posts Found

One of our clients, an international energy company, which classifies business units as development, growth, anchor, or harvesting businesses, depending on their position in the market life cycle. Each portfolio role has its own performance requirements, and businesses are managed based on specific sets of financial indicators. More important, the role of each business determines its guidelines for capital allocation. For example, coal power generation … [ Read more ]

Authors: Sebastian Stange, Ulrich Pidun | Source: The Art of Capital Allocation | Original Publication: Boston Consulting Group | Subjects: Finance, Management, Strategy

To uncover the hidden traps of big new projects being considered, Jaleh Rezaei relies on the “black hat” technique, where you kick off new initiatives by asking a targeted tough question: “Let’s assume that it’s one year from now and we’ve failed at our goal. What went wrong?”

“This question creates a subtle shift from a very optimistic mindset to triggering the team’s problem-solving neurons. … [ Read more ]

Author: Jaleh Rezaei | Source: Better Meetings Make for Better Days — 20 Tactical Ideas to Try Out With Your Team | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subject: Management

companies are starting to be more intentional about hiring for a candidate’s future potential, not their past history. But it’ll be a long road. Our traditional recruiting processes still place an emphasis on certain types of education, experience, or personal referrals that can lead to a homogenous workforce.

Start by rethinking your job descriptions. Focus on the results you’d like to see, rather than the type … [ Read more ]

Author: Ryan Roslansky | Source: You Need a Skills-Based Approach to Hiring and Developing Talent | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources

Performance reviews tend to be more heavily weighted to focus downward. (“I’m your manager, and here is what I think of your performance.”) There may be some mechanism for subordinates to provide feedback upward, but it often doesn’t carry the same importance. And that’s how bad bosses often stay in their roles.

One example of an effective model comes from Aron Ain, the CEO of Ultimate … [ Read more ]

Authors: Adam Bryant, Aron Ain | Source: Do you manage up or down? | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior | Company: Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG)

There’s some debate over the best way to do exit interviews and how valuable they are. But there’s one kind of interview that most organizations fail to do — stay conversations. The concept is simple: Identify your top performers who you hope will stay with you the longest, and ask them why they stay. They may say things like:

• “I have the best manager I’ve ever

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Nate Dvorak, Ryan Pendell | Source: Culture Wins When You Listen to Your Top Performers | Original Publication: Gallup Management Journal (GMJ) | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

Jean-Denis Grezè has seen time and time again that small gestures can have an outsized impact. “I’m a big believer in incentives that align with the culture and values. A funny one that people don’t realize can be super helpful is creating tokens — objects that you reward for a specific behavior,” he says. “You can create a subculture around a new value. Humans … [ Read more ]

Author: Jean-Denis Grezè | Source: How to Build a Culture of Ownership and Other Engineering Leadership Tips from Plaid & Dropbox | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior | Company: Plaid

“We celebrated mistakes at a management gathering with 1,000 people in the room. A manager would get up and say why the environmentally sensitive light bulb or whatever it was…had failed…Then we’d give them $1,000 or a TV or something, depending on the scale of the thing. The point was to share the learning and get smarter as an organization.” — Jack Welch

Author: Jack Welch | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

Online music streaming service Spotify encourages its users to engage in its online community and to provide product ideas via its Idea Submissions page. Here, Spotify customers can submit suggestions on how they want the product to evolve, and other customers can vote on these ideas. Spotify then takes the critical step of closing the loop by letting its online community know which customer ideas … [ Read more ]

Author: Dutta Satadip | Source: How to deliver great customer experience at scale | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Customer-Related, Innovation | Company: Spotify

Molly Graham does a look back, look forward every month or two, or at the end of a project — whatever milestone that makes the most sense for an employee’s role. She asks them to look back on a project that they just finished and run through these questions:

Look back:

• What did you like about that? What felt good?
• What did you hate about it?

… [ Read more ]

Author: Molly Graham | Source: 6 Counterintuitive Rules for Being a Better Manager — Advice from Lambda School Quip & Facebook | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

But people still leave. Some want to try other things at other companies, or the fit isn’t right, so we have to let them go. It’s the natural cycle of business.

What’s never been natural at companies, though, is how these departures are handled. So at Basecamp we’ve created a ritual for when someone leaves: We tell everyone in the company why. Not just that person’s team, … [ Read more ]

Author: Jason Fried | Source: The Best Way to Tell Employees When You’ve Fired Someone | Original Publication: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior | Company: Basecamp

Most have done a 360 and found that personal feedback may differ among supervisors, peers, or subordinates. We advocate a 720 for employees who have contact with people outside their organization. Customer contact employees may be more or less gifted at managing customer relationships. By asking customers their views, employees learn what they do well and not so well.

Authors: Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood | Subject: Human Resources

Keep highly visible scoreboards, big thermometers (as in a fund-raising campaign), bulletin boards, Intranet sites, voice mail messages and newsletters to update everyone on progress toward key goals or change and improvement targets. Make goals/targets and progress as visible as possible.

Author: Jim Clemmer | Source: Team Spirit Built from the Top | Original Publication: The CLEMMER Group | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

A consumer products company created an internal innovation futures market, where managers can go long or short on innovative ideas pitched by the teams creating them. Once the market price of an idea crosses a threshold, the innovators get more funding; if it crosses a higher threshold, it’s transferred into an existing or new business unit. But if its price falls below a certain level, … [ Read more ]

Authors: Paul Willmott, Sam Marwaha | Source: Managing IT for Scale Speed and Innovation | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Innovation

One of the best ways to figure out how to structure your offer is to talk to some of the people who’ve already bought from you. Call them on the phone and say, “What was it about this product that you like? Why did you buy in the first place? What was appealing about it to you? What are some of the best benefits you’ve … [ Read more ]

Author: Jay Conrad Levinson | Source: Solutions to 10 Most Pressing Direct Mail Problems | Original Publication: Guerrilla Marketing | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Several years ago, Pentagon officials put out specific guidelines for computer presentation. They did so to force briefing officers to spend less time developing great slides – and more time developing great briefings. They were also interested in curbing the use of unnecessary PowerPoint features – like wildly zooming pictures and exotic slide transitions. Among other points, a good protocol should mandate the use of … [ Read more ]

Author: Jack Whalen | Source: What’s the Point? | Original Publication: The CEO Refresher | Subject: Productivity/Work Tips

Studies show that encouraging and supporting staff to get involved in the community is a great way to motivate employees and increase team spirit. But instead of sending folks out on their own to volunteer, take your team out for a day to support a local group. This builds collaboration and a sense of respect and accomplishment.

Author: Jim Jenkins | Source: Cost-Effective Team Building Exercises | Original Publication: The CEO Refresher | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Larry Prusak, a former IBM executive who is now scholar in residence at Babson College, notes that some firms are consciously enforcing cooperative social norms. “Firms that encouraged opportunistic behavior and that thought performative ties were just ‘soft stuff’ have not done well,” he says, adding that companies can encourage cooperative behavior in two ways. “First, signals and symbols are important. If a firm promotes … [ Read more ]

Authors: Jack Welch, Larry Prusak | Source: Do Talk to Strangers: Encouraging Performative Ties to Create Competitive Advantage | Original Publication: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball pits the collective old-time wisdom of baseball players, managers, coaches, scouts, and front offices against rigorous statistical analysis in determining which players to recruit. Analysis wins, changing the game forever. Could the same be true for recruiting top talent?

When the National Bureau of Economic Research looked into this, it pitted humans against computers for more than 300,000 hires in high-turnover jobs … [ Read more ]

Authors: Mary Meaney, Scott Keller | Source: Attracting and retaining the right talent | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources

Organizations looking for outside talent pay an extraordinary amount of attention to resumes. […] Once people are inside, it’s almost as if some of kind of reset button is pressed: The details of their backgrounds seem to get dumped onto a far-off slag heap, and they become known only for what they do at the new organization. I call this phenomenon resumenesia — a malady … [ Read more ]

Author: Eric J. McNulty | Source: The Search for Hidden Talent Treasures | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Human Resources, Management

San Francisco startup Weebly invites job candidates to work on site during a “trial week,” paid at fair market value. Why? Simple: it’s very hard to suppress values-incongruent behaviors when working closely with others for that long. As their CEO says: “Assholes can hide it in interviews, but for whatever reason, they cannot hide it for a whole week. I don’t know why, but it … [ Read more ]

Author: Cameron Sepah | Source: Your Company’s Culture is Who You Hire Fire and Promote | Original Publication: Medium | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources | Company: Weebly