156 Posts Found

Share all core strategic measurements (including “confidential” financial, and operating data) with everyone in your organization. Treat people like full-fledged business partners and they’ll act that way. But don’t snow them under with a blizzard of meaningless reports and numbers. Train everyone how to read these data. Show them how to relate the measurements to their daily operations and improvement activities.

Author: Jim Clemmer | Source: “Education and Communications Pathways and Pitfalls” | Subjects: Leadership, Management

Employee resistance is the most common reason executives cite for the failure of big organizational-change efforts. Companies need to develop strong change leaders employees know and respect—in other words, people with informal influence. But there’s one problem: finding them. How can company leaders identify those people beforehand to better harness their energy, creativity, and goodwill—and thereby increase the odds of success?

One way we’ve found … [ Read more ]

Author: Lili Duan | Source: “Tapping the power of hidden influencers” | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Change Management, Management, Organizational Behavior

Not all roles are created equal. Many companies don’t take the trouble to understand which are their linchpin roles—as distinct from high-performing or high-potential people. These are roles that have a big influence on the customer experience or that provide critical support or coaching to employees who shape the customer’s response. Given scarce resources, targeting these roles can be an efficient way to raise employee … [ Read more ]

Author: Domenico Azzarello | Source: “The Chemistry of Enthusiasm” | Original Publication: Bain | Subjects: Customer-Related, Human Resources, Management

Leading companies like FedEx and others have found that a daily metric that tracks occurrence of errors that frustrate customers can be a simple and easy way of measuring and predicting when a customer might leave and never come back. By holding focus groups with customers from a variety of industries and locations, FedEx gathered a long list of things the company had done to … [ Read more ]

Author: Mark Graham Brown | Source: “The Customer Aggravation Index: Predicting Customer Loyalty Without Surveys” | Original Publication: Business Finance | Subjects: Customer-Related, Management

A profit map, the core analytical tool of profitability management, displays the profitability and cost structure of every product in every customer in the company. Profit maps show exactly where profit is flowing and where it is lost.

A profit map is not especially difficult to develop, but it is completely different from the information developed for financial reporting. Many finance managers make the … [ Read more ]

Author: Jonathan Byrnes | Source: “3 Steps to Turbo Charge Profits” | Original Publication: Business Finance | Subjects: Accounting, Finance, Management, Operations

To foster staff longevity, organizations can arrange for group members to switch roles with one another. Google, for example, encourages employees to leave their positions and take on “bungee” assignments for three months to one year in different areas of the company. Employees can acquire new skills and find out whether they like a new job (or are good at it) before committing to it. … [ Read more ]

Author: Daniel McFarland | Source: “What Is the Secret to a Happy Collaboration?” | Original Publication: Stanford University | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

When faced with the need to expand manufacturing capacity and the inherent investment required, first perform a thorough profitability analysis (a profit map) of each product produced from the capacity-constrained factories (this includes profitable products being sold unprofitably to selected customers). Since many companies have a significant amount of unprofitable business, it is quite possible that stopping the unprofitable sales can free up enough capacity … [ Read more ]

Subjects: Management, Operations

Leaders can reduce the risk of losing good people for the wrong reasons by working with them to understand their passions and career goals and serving up challenging assignments that help them grow from where they are to where they would like to go.

Customizing opportunities to each employee requires understanding that person’s goals, motivations, and values. It’s a simple process, but very few … [ Read more ]

Author: Susan Cramm | Source: “Align with Your Star Employees” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

If your organization is suffering from a plague of projects, stopping a few of them only fixes the symptoms of the plague. Your first step should be to change the way projects are started. One of the best tips is to make sure all projects are launched with a kill switch of some kind—that is, tangible metrics and milestones defining when the project should be … [ Read more ]

Author: Paddy Miller | Source: “Kill Your Darlings” | Original Publication: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Management, Project Management

It’s important for senior leaders to find a way that people can share information in reasonably efficient ways. I really like the example of Salesforce under Steve Greene and Chris Fry — they had a policy where engineers were free to change jobs within the company. So, every four months they’d have an internal job fair, like a bazaar with booths, where people would walk … [ Read more ]

Author: Hayagreeva Rao | Source: “How Do You Scale Excellence?” | Original Publication: Stanford University | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Two simple questions can help guide the process of eliminating or rewriting cumbersome policies. First, does the policy protect the organization from violating safety, legal, or regulatory standards? If the policy helps ensure compliance, leaders should still ask themselves if there is a better way to structure the policy to ensure compliance in the most efficient and effective way possible. Second, does the policy help … [ Read more ]

Author: Kannan Ramaswamy | Source: “Are You Your Employees’ Worst Enemy?” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

One of the easiest and most effective programs to initiate is peer recognition. Peer recognition gives employees the power to reward each other for doing a good job. It works because employees themselves know who works hard and deserves recognition. After all, managers can’t be everywhere all the time, and employees are in the best position to catch people doing the right things.

For example, in … [ Read more ]

Author: Gregory P. Smith | Source: “Reward and Recognition Programs Increase Employee Motivation” | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

To minimize the “we-they” syndrome, have employees rotate jobs for one hour each week. For example, the person in the Sales Department works on the front desk. Someone from Maintenance will work in the Customer Service etc. This builds a stronger team and improves communication within the company.

Author: Gregory P. Smith | Source: “Reward and Recognition Programs Increase Employee Motivation” | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The creeping problem of administrative BS, committees, teams, projects and three-letter management programs all seemed important and necessary when they were initiated. And individually, each of these programs or activities appears important and valuable. However, as organizations get older and more successful, they see the need for more and more of this stuff that was just not necessary in the early lean years. There was … [ Read more ]

Author: Mark Graham Brown | Source: “How to Avoid Corporate Middle-Age Spread” | Original Publication: Business Finance | Subject: Management

Just as the Net Promoter approach has strong descriptive and predictive power with customers, it works just as well in the realm of employee engagement. Loyalty leaders measure engagement by asking a handful of simple but predictive questions: Would you ask your friends and family to work in this company? Why? And would you recommend our product or service to your friends and family? What … [ Read more ]

Author: Domenico Azzarello | Source: “The Chemistry of Enthusiasm” | Original Publication: Bain | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

“The premortem technique is a sneaky way to get people to do contrarian, devil’s advocate thinking,” explains psychologist Gary Klein. “Before a project starts, say, ‘We’re looking in a crystal ball, and this project has failed; it’s a fiasco. Now, everybody, take two minutes and write down all the reasons why you think the project has failed.”

Author: Gary Klein | Source: “Taking the Bias Out of Meetings” | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Heike Bruch and Jochen I. Menges make a strong argument for starting an initiative to kill initiatives in their April 2010 Harvard Business Review article “The Acceleration Trap.” Far too many “walking dead” projects clog capacity in most organizations. Once superfluous activities have been cut, leaders can allocate resources according to the priority of the remaining projects and initiatives. This requires the application of a … [ Read more ]

Author: Kannan Ramaswamy | Source: “Are You Your Employees’ Worst Enemy?” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Finance, Innovation, Management

Ask participants to write down their initial positions, use voting devices, or ask participants for their “balance sheets” of pros and cons. “Frankly, I’m surprised that when you have a reasonably well-informed group it isn’t more common to begin by having everyone write their conclusions on a slip of paper,” remarks Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. “If you don’t do that, the discussion will create an … [ Read more ]

Author: Dan P. Lovallo | Source: “Taking the Bias Out of Meetings” | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

A fearless workplace frees people to take the risks innovation requires. At W.L. Gore, the Delaware chemical products company famous for Gore-Tex and other high-performance products, mistakes made in the pursuit of novel solutions are accepted as part of the creative process. When a project is killed, staff members celebrate its passing with beer and champagne. When a project fails, a post-mortem is conducted. Flawed … [ Read more ]

Author: Jay Rao | Source: “To Innovate, Get the People Issues Right” | Original Publication: Babson Insight | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Project Management

Always ask people making an investment recommendation to present their second-best choice. It’s rarely better than the first. But both might actually be good, and both recommendations of another business unit might not be. Considering just one recommendation from every business unit will deprive you of many investment opportunities you’d get if you asked for two.

Author: Dan P. Lovallo | Source: “Making great decisions” | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Finance, Management