104 Posts Found

Several studies have shown that when groups fail to arrive at decisions, it’s often because they devote too much time to finding common ground rather than weighing the pros and cons of what each person is saying. Meetings are especially ineffective when attendees begin by disclosing which way they are leaning; upon voicing an opinion about a decision, people are more likely to ignore information … [ Read more ]

Author: Matt Palmquist | Source: “Listen First, Comment Later” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Organization design can and should provide an effective and practical resolution to many stubborn strategy and business-execution issues. If a redesign is to work, senior executives need to recognize that all three elements of design—structure, individual capabilities, and roles and collaboration—are essential in making a change.

If an organization’s structure is its skeleton, then individual capabilities are its muscular system, providing energy and vitality, … [ Read more ]

Author: Julie Kilmann | Source: “Role Charters” | Original Publication: Boston Consulting Group | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Sometimes workplace rules don’t have anything to do with customer engagement, a better workplace, limiting risk or liability, or avoiding catastrophes—they exist to make life easier for a small part of the organization without any regard for other more important factors. These rules ensure compliance with the policies of a particular department. And those in that department often fiercely guard and protect their rules.

[ Read more ]

Author: Tom Rieger | Source: “Guarding the Guards: Crushing the Bureaucratic Rules that Limit Success” | Original Publication: ChangeThis | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Every change initiative has its own unique risk profile. Bain has identified 30 specific risks that threaten to disrupt change efforts, things like poor sponsorship and change overload. These risks tend to occur with predictable patterns over the life cycle of a change. But only a handful of these risks determine success or failure at each stage. At the beginning of a change initiative, for … [ Read more ]

Author: Patrick Litre | Source: “Realize results: Busting Three Common Myths of Change Management” | Original Publication: Bain | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

It’s often difficult in creative fields to set specific deliverables to which you can attach incentives. And the very fact that a manager focuses so much on money can strip away workers’ own intrinsic motivations or blind them to other goals that don’t come with a bonus attached.

In the search for other solutions, Harvard Business School professor Karim R. Lakhani and London Business School professor … [ Read more ]

Author: Karim R. Lakhani | Source: “Getting to Eureka!: How Companies Can Promote Creativity” | Original Publication: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

In order to take full advantage of the latent practical knowledge of staff and conduct a revision of company processes, after 3 weeks every new employee is encouraged to single out all the idiosyncrasies that the company has as well as question practices and procedures. Using the simple questions below (or more sector specific questions), management encourages communication and discovers new ways of looking at … [ Read more ]

Source: “Hack: Getting Value out of New Employees by Kaeden Arnold” | Original Publication: Management Innovation eXchange (MiX) | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

When bringing a new employee onto your team, the experience of current employees can be extremely valuable, particularly those who themselves were recently the new kid on the block. Ask your current employees what they wish they had known sooner. Brainstorm a list of buzzwords and acronyms. And ask current employees what their plans are to help the newcomer get on board and up to … [ Read more ]

Author: Dick Grote | Source: “Making Onboarding Work” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Recent research by Christensen, Brigham Young University Professor Jeffrey Dyer and INSEAD Professor Hal Gregersen concludes that successful innovators share a set of attributes. The good news is that anyone can bolster their “Innovator’s DNA” by taking the right actions.

For example, organizations can help individuals develop their DNA by providing experiential learning opportunities such as “job swaps.” In 2008, Procter & Gamble swapped employees with … [ Read more ]

Author: Scott D. Anthony | Source: “The Innovative HR Leader” | Original Publication: Human Resource Executive Online | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

Ford has put a rule in place. It says: ‘You have 24 hours to take a new and emerging issue, try to understand it and see if you can resolve it yourself. After that, you have to go public with it.’ It’s an escalation process. Because with a lot of these issues, we can solve them pretty quickly by applying the intellect we have in … [ Read more ]

Author: Bennie Fowler | Source: “How Ford Profits from its ’24 Hour Rule'” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

How do you find the smartest people in an organization? As we all know, intelligence does not always correspond to current job title. And in an technology company such as Novell, the real brilliant guys and gals are engineers hidden many layers below the top.

Here’s how Eric Schmidt found them, as he told Harvard Business Review in 2001.

“I used a kind of algorithm to locate … [ Read more ]

Author: Sean Silverthorne | Source: “Find the Smartest People in Your Organization” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Focus conversations on meaningfulness, choice, competence and progress. Leaders from the top down need to convey the same message—that the organization stands for doing work that matters and doing it well. When approaching any work project, leaders can underline the importance of contribution by focusing discussions on the basic questions in the self-management process:

• What can we do here that is meaningful?
• What creative

… [ Read more ]

Author: Kenneth W. Thomas | Source: “The Four Intrinsic Rewards that Drive Employee Engagement” | Original Publication: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Require each senior manager in the company to share an office with a peer from another department. Have the rest of the staff sit in open spaces. These arrangements “make it easy for people to take five minutes between phone calls to talk. They also send a message about how important we believe teamwork is.”

Author: J. Stuart Moore | Source: “It Takes Two ” | Original Publication: Fast Company | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Mosaic, a faith-based nonprofit organization that provides a variety of support services for people with developmental disabilities, has institutionalized a feedback process. Mosaic has more than 4,800 employees in 50 communities in 15 U.S. states and Great Britain. Very few of them directly report to a central administration office, which could hinder communication. So Mosaic developed the Feedback and Change Team (FACT), which consists of … [ Read more ]

Author: Jennifer Robison | Source: “Getting the Most Out of Remote Workers” | Original Publication: Gallup Management Journal (GMJ) | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

One easy, fun and impactful system you can put in place is called the “101 Dream Goals.” Give each employee thirty minutes and have them write as many things they can think of that:

* They’d like to buy
* They’d like to do
* They want to learn
* They want to try for the first time
* Personal goals they want to … [ Read more ]

Author: Cameron Herold | Source: “Make Your Employees’ Dreams Come True” | Original Publication: OPEN Fourm | Subjects: Human Resources, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

In a hierarchy, the lion’s share of recognition and recompense goes to those who hold the biggest titles. The real heroes are left unsung.

Linden Lab’s Remedy: The community—not some select group of corporate overlords—does the rewarding. …It does this through a software tool, called the Rewarder.

Each quarter, every associate is given an equal share of a portion of Linden’s net proft—recently, about one thousand … [ Read more ]

Author: Jeffrey Hollender | Source: “The Death and Life of Corporate Responsibility” | Original Publication: ChangeThis | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab’s charismatic founder and chairman, took one long night to build a simple but potent tool for community building. He calls it the “Love Machine.” It’s a Web page that lets any of Linden’s roughly three hundred associates zap a quick-hit message of appreciation to a colleague.

Say a coder beats a do-or-die deadline for patching a troublesome bug that’s infected Second Life’s … [ Read more ]

Author: Jeffrey Hollender | Source: “The Death and Life of Corporate Responsibility” | Original Publication: ChangeThis | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the ubiquitous BlackBerry, is one company that takes great pains to signal its distance from the shareholder value principle. Back in 1997, just after the firm’s IPO, the founders made a rule that any manager who talked about the share price at work had to buy a doughnut for every person in the company. Early infractions were not terribly … [ Read more ]

Author: Roger Martin | Source: “The Age of Customer Capitalism” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Many of us subscribe to the “cockroach theory,” the idea that earnings shortfalls and other problems are like cockroaches: there’s never just one. As a result, stocks commonly sell off more than an earnings miss seemingly warrants. The cockroach theory works because business executives rarely take the vigorous steps necessary to ensure that bad news reaches them. All too often, problems get stuck in the … [ Read more ]

Author: Anne-Marie Fink | Source: “Beyond Buy or Sell: What a Business Leader Really Can Learn from an Analyst Report” | Original Publication: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

During the first month of training, Zappos offers new employees $2,000 to quit, plus their time worked. It sounds expensive, but in the long term, it’s not. We want people to be here because they are passionate about customer service and because they like our culture. We don’t want people who are just here for a paycheck. Those people generally end up leaving six or … [ Read more ]

Author: Tony Hsieh | Source: “The Ultimate Business Tune-up for Times Like These” | Original Publication: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

A useful tool to zero in on decision-making problems and create higher-yielding change programs is a decision management tool we call RAPID. The idea is to clearly map out who plays what role in each critical decision and use that to enable swift decisions, without endless debates, second-guessing or pocket vetoes. It determines the captain of the boat, so to speak, but in a more … [ Read more ]

Author: Miles Cook | Source: “Pulling Away: Managing and Sustaining Change” | Original Publication: Bain | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior