May 10, 2012 1 pm EDT
|
Leadership Transitions: How to Do It Right
|
The arrival of a new leader at the helm of a department, division, or organization typically
follows the same ritual. The leader benefits from a few months of relative calm, the
honeymoon period, where he or she is not expected to have answers yet or be fully
effective. The clock is however ticking and the leader feels increasing pressure as the days
go by. The mature leader will know that this is the period to withhold judgment and
decisions and explore as openly as possible the new situation. Meeting people one-on-one
ads up to hours and weeks of exploration. The leader collects the many views, often in
conflict, and has to decide for himself what is real. We commonly see transition periods
stretching out to 6 months.
This process is not effective; our experience is that with the support of the organization, the
new leader can be have a fully operational team in a matter of 3 months.
|
| |
Igniting Team Productivity
|
The collective thinking about productivity is for the most part a remnant of the industrial age:
productivity improvements are expected to be slow, marginal gains. In an economy
dominated by services and knowledge-based industries, productivity is less and less
dependent on capital assets, machinery, and more on human interactions. In many
organizations, we have found that team productivity improvements can be not only fast but
also dramatic, not 5% but 50% and more.
|
| |
Every Day Team Building for Leaders
|
Team building must be an every day concern for leaders. Team building exercises at the
annual retreat are potentially doing more harm than good; focusing on all getting along has
often a chilling effect on the ability of individuals to express openly what is of concern to
them.
|
| |
Staying the Course: Implementing Your Strategy without Fail
|
How to make sure that what has been decided and committed to gets documented, tracked
and delivered. Teams need to keep practicing how to hold productive meetings that stay
focused on what is needed to meet the team outcomes rather than getting lost in the
minutia of what they have done so far. Leaders need support too to provide proper
guidance: keeping the clarity of vision upfront, resolving the issues that no one else in the
team can tackle, and holding regular accountability interactions. Too many leaders get busy
on others issues right after the strategy setting, and fail to make accountability a clear
priority.
|
| |
Converting your Strategy into a Blueprint for Action
|
In this episode, we discuss a simple proven approach to convert your strategic decisions
into a blueprint for action rapidly. This is a critical step because for a strategy to be
implemented, it needs to be understood by those that are to implement it. Why certain
choices of direction have been made must be clear. Yet if you leave it at that, most people
will have a hard time reconciling how to get from where they are to where you want them to
be. The high ideas of strategy will die on the “messy” realities of everyday issues. For
everything to come together, the high level strategy has to be articulated into a blueprint for
action drawn with the participations of implementers. The blueprint will identify initiatives in
detail: what, by whom, when, milestones, etc., and check those tasks against the
organization’s ability to deliver them with existing capacities.
|
| |
Why Could You Possibly Need a Strategy?
|
Join us as we explore what a well conceived strategy can do for any organization whether
business, agency, or NGO. From its conception to its implementation, what gives impetus to
a strategy is whether participants are fully engaged with it. A strategy cannot simply be a
document that people read for information, it has to be a common agreement that makes it
clear to all involved what the ultimate objective is, what each one will do to contribute
toward that outcome in their day to day decisions. As Michael Porter, the Harvard University
strategy professor, said: “The #1 purpose of strategy is alignment.”
|
| |
What is Rational Leadership?
|
Sticking to the facts? Avoiding emotional time-wasters? Keeping on task? OR is it really?
|
| |
Fear and Self-Protection: the Seeds of Team Failure
|
We sometimes hear that fear is a powerful motivator. It may be so on the battlefield, but in
organizations, fear, and the accompanying need to protect oneself, is actually what brings
teams to fail or under-perform.
Leaders, in their desire to see results and to get things done fast, invariably drive team
meetings to focus on technical discussions and how things are going to get. Yet things are
not going to get done if individuals commit to tasks that they know they cannot deliver or
team members cannot coordinate their actions properly because they have not been able to
speak truthfully.
Leaders need to foremost create the space where individuals feel safe to talk openly about
what they think should be done, or what is preventing them from completing what is asked
of them.
|
| |
Mistakes to Avoid when Leading a Critical Meeting
|
There are 3 mistakes meeting participants commonly make that negatively impact the
implementation of the decisions taken during the meeting. In this episode we discuss our
experience and three very simple strategies to make the meetings you hold productive.
|
| |
Handling Emotional Conversations Productively
|
Are you avoiding the conversations that are potentially emotional? Or are you repeating the
same angry unproductive exchanges? What is it costing you personally and your
organization? Is there a path other than fight or flight?
|
|
Is a fun culture key to a company’s success?
|
|
Technology start-ups pride themselves in having the type of fun culture that attracts young
talent. As the companies grow, they experience that newcomers don’t necessarily have the
same view of what fun is, and that, as new concerns emerge, new skills and new practices
are required. We explore what people value in a workplace, and what are the elements of a
“fun” culture that are worth keeping.
|
|
Improving Team Coordination and Follow-through—Part 2
|
|
Team meetings usually focus on what each participant has done since the previous meeting.
A lot of minute details are brought forward that are mostly not relevant to others. As
individuals perceive that the meeting is not directly relevant, their interest and attention
diminish. How can a leader bring focus to such meetings, keep them short and at maximum
relevance for all to ensure that all team members are fully engaged?
|
| |
Improving Team Coordination and Follow-through—Part 1
|
|
Even with the best intentions, project implementations often flounder because teams rush
forward to carry out tasks without full understanding of the desired outcomes, and of all the
parts needed for the implementation to work. The price for not investing time upfront is
paid over and over once the project gets off track and pressures build to correct course.
In this 2-part series, we explore how leaders can keep teams on target without delving into
micro-management.
|
|
Moving from Conflict to Productive Conversations
|
|
Do conversations need to be confrontational or at least blunt in order to get to the bottom
of things? We discuss our experience on how to have authentic productive conversations
that get results by applying a few simple skills in interactions with colleagues and team
members.
|
| |
Improve your team's results in one day
|
|
Whether you, as a leader, need to define a new strategy, improve performance, or
implement needed changes, the most effective point of leverage you have is to improve the
mindset of the team that will carry out the objectives. Leaders we work with often think of
this as nearly impossible. In this episode we discuss our experience of turning around the
mindset of a group from apathetic to positive in one day.
|
| |
Getting off the treadmill: not so easy for leaders
|
|
Meetings; making sure that everything is taken care of; balancing short-term results and
long-term strategy, the day of a leader is often an incessant barrage of demands with little
time to step back and consider if their time is used in the best way for themselves and for
the sake of the organization they lead. We discuss the common traps and how to work your
way into leading instead of sweating the details.
|
|
How to have more productive team meetings
|
|
Meetings are key moments in the life of an organization but are generally viewed as time
drains because they are often ineffective. In this episode we discuss two types of meetings,
the status report meeting and the planning meeting and some of the traps that a leader can
avoid in order to energize meetings and improve outcomes.
|
| |
How to Define an Activating Purpose
|
Some organizations or teams have especially challenging missions. Others are in a more
supporting function. Others yet don’t see them involved at all in the end results. This
affects morale, the ability to benchmark how they are doing, and takes away real incentives
to keep them checking on the efficient use of resources and value-added outcomes.
|
| |
Summer: Time for a Break or Time to Move Forward?
|
Given summer is upon us, do you hold off on major action to reorganize/transform teams, or
is now the opportune time? Many leaders don’t see summer as the ideal time to step back
and reflect on their vision, strategy or restructuring. Wise leaders, however, know that
there is no ‘real’ best time to do this work and take advantage of the summer season to
initiate these vital conversations, knowing full well the discomfort they may bring to their
teams.
|
|
|
How to create strategic vision, alignment of people and implementation performance. Whole
system thinking prevents common pitfalls that groups easily fall into by missing their own
blind spots, jumping to conclusions without considering unintended impacts, focusing on the
solutions that the more forceful members of the group put forward. Whole system thinking
considers all the parts of the system, and its interactions with its functional environment.
Used effectively it leads to common ground faster, generates solutions that everyone
believes in, and accelerates implementation of change because everyone understands how
their own tasks integrate with the common goals.
|
| |
Re-energizing Teams Demoralized by Failure
|
How do leaders revitalize teams that are demotivated from having experienced failure for
outcomes they were not totally responsible for? We explore the pattern of how the
downspin occurs, and offer insights into effective ways to re-energize teams that have
needed experience and knowledge into re-inventing purpose and approaches.
|
|
How to Make your Board Meetings More Productive
|
Running or even attending board meetings is often a suboptimal experience. There are
many incarnations of boards from corporations, to charitable organizations to family
businesses or professional partnerships. There are elements that are characteristic of
boards that create challenges in themselves; board members are often peers; they may not
have access to the same information that managers have; they may not have the
experience of organizations. How can those individuals come together in effective
gatherings to fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities of oversight and guidance?
|
|
How to Avoid Team Burnout
|
People can work hard for short periods of times when they are clear about the purpose.
When overwhelm goes on for too long, it interferes with people’s life and raises stress.
Interactions become tenser, communications suffer, misunderstandings increase. It is vital to
work on clarity; not let friction build.
|
|
The Impact of the Leader's Style on the Group's Performance
|
|
A group's performance largely depends on its dominant culture, whether positive or
negative. Over time, culture is influenced primarily by the style of the leader. The leader can
therefore increase the group's performance by using a generative type of leadership. On
the other hand, a new leader may find that the group they are taking over operates in a
negative culture that is the legacy of the previous leader. Before it can be changed the
existing culture needs to be understood by the new leader.
|
| |
Creativity and Innovation in the Work Place
|
How can leaders stimulate the creativity and innovation that their organization absolutely
needs in order to remain relevant in the current marketplace? How to motivate their staff to
embrace initiative and new work practices? The tendency to push or make a rational case is
generally met by resistance and defensiveness. Change comes from leaders engage their
teams into new conversations where they can move from polarizing positions to a place
where new solutions are free to be conceived.
|
| |
How to Operate when Leadership from the Top is Missing
|
|
Teams generally expect supervisors to give them clear goals. They can then focus on how
to get things done. When marching orders are vague or seem unrealistic, teams are ill
prepared to deal with the uncertainty. They are walking, ready or not, into an environment
where setting direction and handling problems are up to the team. Teams have to reinvent
the way they work together if they want to succeed: personal high stress and withdrawal
are the very factors that will prevent them from stepping up to the challenge.
|
| |
The Productivity Sinkholes
|
Productivity is mostly discussed in terms of process efficiency or cost reductions, but we
have found over the years that the factors that drain productivity the most show up every
time someone has to move forward with a new task. Repeated hundreds even thousands
of time during the day, these holdbacks and hesitations absorb huge amounts of time.
Remove confusion, distrust and fear of failure, and reallocate the time absorbed by those
factors, and your team’s productivity and performance will take off.
|
| |
Make Your Strategy Happen
|
Just a few months after the strategy has been set, the original intent is but a faint memory.
Little has changed, plans have not been implemented and performance against the original
goals is so off that they are no longer helpful. The seeds for things to unravel during
implementation appear at the very beginning of the strategy planning. Implementation
cannot be an after-thought; it has to be included in evaluating whether the strategy is
coherent from inception.
|
| |
|
What is clear to leaders is often not understood by anyone else around them. And without
being clear on what really matters, employees are ill prepared to take initiative, give the
appropriate feedback and carry out their responsibilities in the most effective way. Create a
clear picture of how the mission flows to the action steps, and the team begins naturally to
operate at a higher lever, coordinating better, working smarter not harder, and improving
follow-through in a matter of days.
|
| |
|
We all know that people with a poor mindset have a hard time performing well. It shows up
in sports in a striking manner.
Much is said about boosting employee morale but for most leaders it is an elusive goal. We
will discuss how this can be resolved by helping employees feel less overwhelmed by
understanding how they fit in the overall system, and how they specifically contribute to the
team's success.
|
| |
The Elephant in the Room:
|
What to do when teams get stuck by avoiding the very issues that need to be dealt with.
|
| |
