32 Posts found for Publisher: strategy+business

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)

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

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

At Zumasys, in addition to the typical corporate benefits, every employee gets three to four weeks of vacation, complementary access to the company’s two-bedroom Vegas loft, and the opportunity to qualify for a tenure-based international travel program that, each year, gives four to six employees a week off with pay and a $4,000 stipend to travel to the destination of their choice. The open-book financials … [ Read more ]

Authors: Paul Giobbi, Susan Cramm | Source: “Strengthening Your Cultural Fortress” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior, Social Responsibility | Company: Zumasys

One of the best ways to find out where consumers’ pain points (and thus your opportunities) are is to talk to your frontline people. Your retail and call center people have heard it all; once every quarter, spend half a day asking them what challenges your customers face, and then focus your innovation investments on findings ways to address those issues.

Author: Catherine Palmieri | Source: “Boost Your Innovation Confidence” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subject: Customer-Related

The corporate use of external talent across sectors and geographies is more common than ever. Talent can provide companies with access to new capabilities and technologies; it can enable faster and more agile response to markets; it can be used to test new opportunities before making major investments; it can be used to respond to demand peaks and to attain scale quickly; and, perhaps most … [ Read more ]

Author: Theodore Kinni | Source: “External Talent Needs Management Too” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Behavior changes, even those that represent clear benefits for employees, require active reinforcement — including accountability mechanisms and human champions. A management consulting team leader, worried about exhaustion on her teams, began encouraging more rest. But when the sincere urging hardly affected the entrenched behavior, she established “the energy audit.” Every workday she asked members of her team to email or text one item they were … [ Read more ]

Authors: Carolyn Black, Chad Gomes, Jon Katzenbach | Source: “The power of feelings at work” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Companies train people in their computer systems, HR policies, and more. They devote energy to optimizing production lines and supply chains. They invest in innovation workshops. Yet they seem to assume that the ability to effectively lead and participate in meetings is somehow embedded in the human genetic code. Perhaps it seems too basic a skill. However, if any organization adds up the amount of … [ Read more ]

Author: Eric J. McNulty | Source: “How to Maximize Meetings” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Productivity/Work Tips

Imagine you are a new CEO, looking at your company with fresh eyes. Ask yourself: What function or resource most constrains our progress? Where would the smallest improvement yield the biggest impact on our business? In other words, you need to identify your “Herbie-group.” Are you limited by how well field staff in sales, operations, or customer support translate new offerings, new markets, or improved … [ Read more ]

Author: Elizabeth Doty | Source: “Finding the ‘Herbie’ in Your Change Initiative” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subject: Change Management

There are several tools you can use to develop perceptual acuity for yourself and your organization in this way. One of the most valuable is a simple exercise at the start of any staff meeting. Allocate the first 10 minutes to learn about and discuss anomalies in the external landscape. Ask a different staff member at each meeting to present to the team a structural … [ Read more ]

Author: Ram Charan | Source: “20/20 Foresight” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subject: Innovation

Every night, Marshall Goldsmith forces himself to do one of the most difficult things imaginable. He has a friend call him and ask the same 22 questions. These questions all start with the phrase, “Did I do my best [today] to,” and the endings may be strategic (“Did I do my best to set clear goals?”), professional (“…preserve all client relationships?”), philosophical (“…be grateful for … [ Read more ]

Author: Art Kleiner | Source: “Are Marshall Goldsmith’s Triggers the Only Way to Change?” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subject: Personal Improvement

Collaborating effectively requires helping others. And helping others requires compassion, which in turn means learning about who they are and what they want. So in order to help my clients, at the start of each relationship, I devote two or three hours to asking the following questions:

• What are your proudest accomplishments and biggest disappointments?
• Which activities energize you and which drain you?
• How do other people

… [ Read more ]

Author: Susan Cramm | Source: “What’s Love Got to Do with Business?” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Improvement

Create a safe, open environment that gives employees the confidence to share ideas, failures, and the learning points in between. 3M holds formal meetings called “failure forums,” which gathers together staff who worked on unsuccessful projects to discuss barriers to success. When plastics company W.L. Gore & Associates kills a project, they host a celebration with beer or champagne, just as they would if the … [ Read more ]

Author: Lisa Bodell | Source: “Why You Didn’t Meet Your Innovation Goals in 2014” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subject: Innovation

Perhaps the biggest challenge for companies seeking to take advantage of its data resources is how few non-IT managers possess robust data skills. A consumer products company addressed this issue by requiring its MBA hires to go through an intensive orientation on data and its use, which includes placing recruits on the data team for some time. This program has enabled the company’s business side … [ Read more ]

Author: Ramesh Nair | Source: “The Quantified Self Goes Corporate” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subject: IT / Internet / E-Business

At Honda, employees wear white pants and white shirts with their first names embroidered in red on the upper right side. It’s the uniform that every Honda Motor Company employee, whether pipe fitter or president, wears on the job at every factory or office. This is intended to diminish the influence of rank; in the moment-to-moment give-and-take of Honda workers’ daily responsibilities, all points of … [ Read more ]

Author: Jeffrey Rothfeder | Source: “For Honda, Waigaya Is the Way” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Organizations can become obsessed with short-term results. But Harvard Business School professor emeritus Michael Beer believes that the intense focus on quarterly results can impair an organization’s ability to create long-term value both for investors and society. By asking about a longer time horizon, you can encourage someone to contemplate issues and unintended consequences that could result from trying only to satisfy one group of … [ Read more ]

Author: Michael Beer | Source: “Lead by Asking” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subject: Management

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

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

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

E. Tory Higgins, the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, argues that one of two states tends to dominate the way we think: a promotion focus or a prevention focus. The basic distinction is really to do with when you’re pursuing goals or making decisions. The promotion state is when you think of your goal as something to accomplish, something to aspire to; … [ Read more ]

Author: E. Tory Higgins | Source: “What’s My Motivation?” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior