3577 Posts Found

Organizations are intricate systems with various components interacting in diverse ways, making it impossible for any member, including the directors and the CEO, to have a complete picture of the organization, despite all efforts to collect data and information. Consequently, all members inevitably focus on partial observations of what happens and fill in the gaps of unobserved reality with their own beliefs and assumptions.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ekin Ilseven | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Organizational Behavior

So whether you’re a manager delivering feedback to your direct report, or sending feedback up the management chain, the best way to make your conversation heard is to make the listener feel safe, and to show that you’re saying it because you care about her and want her to succeed. “If you come off with even a whiff of an ulterior motive — you want … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Julie Zhuo | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

In fast-paced, complex business environments, it’s often hard to carve out the time for thoughtful, thorough analysis. Leaders might recognize that better questions lead to better decisions, but they aren’t sure exactly what to ask. These five questions can help. 1) What would happen if we did nothing? 2) What could make us regret this decision? 3) What alternatives did we overlook? 4) How will we … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Steven Morris | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

A new study finds that revealing employee pay unexpectedly influences workplace dynamics in ways never demonstrated before.

Content: Article | Authors: Boris Maciejovsky, David Danelski | Source: Futurity.org | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources, Management, Motivation, Organizational Behavior

Managing organizational culture, often a challenge, is getting even harder with the rise of the alternative workforce. How can leaders bring independent contractors, telecommuters, and gig workers into their organization’s culture when so many of the traditional levers don’t apply?

Content: Article | Authors: Karen Reid, Kelly Monahan | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

Storytelling is a key business skill. Here’s how to make your narratives more persuasive.

Content: Article | Authors: Craig Wortmann, Emily Stone, Liz Livingston Howard, Michelle L. Buck, Mitchell A. Petersen, Steven Franconeri | Source: Kellogg Insight | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Storytelling

It’s well known that understanding your boss’s priorities is crucial for career success. Yet many professionals find themselves guessing what their manager really wants or needs. The result? Misaligned efforts, wasted time, and missed opportunities for both you and your leadership. The problem isn’t just busy bosses or poor communication — it’s that we often don’t ask the good questions to get inside our manager’s head. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Melody Wilding | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Career, Career Info, Organizational Behavior

It’s important to have the leadership conversation that asks: Are you building the culture we want?

Content: Quotation | Author: Johnathan Nightingale | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Culture, Leadership, Organizational Behavior

The people who will screw you over in your organization typically don’t work in your department. It’s not because those people are assholes, but mostly because they don’t have the same frameworks in their head as you have in your head.

Content: Quotation | Author: Melissa Nightingale | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Humans need boundaries as much as they need sleep. Humans need meaning and connection, and they need these things — as working people or consumers of business products or leaders of businesses themselves — as much they need convenience, speed, or scale.

Content: Quotation | Author: Julia Hobsbawm | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Customer Related, Management, Organizational Behavior

We have a very peculiar industry in finance. The people who go into it all think they’re enormously gifted, whether that’s true or not, and they all believe that they should at least be lieutenant colonels in the army, if not all generals. And when that’s your workforce, you have to deal with people in a very unusual way. Because if you don’t, all these … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Stephen A. Schwarzman | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Culture, Industry Specific, Organizational Behavior

There are two problems with relying so much on data.

The first problem is our desire to make business a science and identify cause and effect in isolation. The outcomes of so many decisions that companies make are not determined by inescapable laws of science. They’re determined by the actions of leaders who have agency to affect those outcomes.

The second problem with data is that when … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Zeynep Ton | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

Many team dysfunctions manifest as trust issues when, in fact, they stem from discrepancies in goals, priorities, or expectations. Clearing up those misunderstandings often resolves what you thought were interpersonal issues.

Content: Quotation | Author: Liane Davey | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

We always talk about scaling companies, but companies are just collections of people. If you’re not really thoughtful about them and what they need to succeed, it’s going to be hard to succeed as a company.

Content: Quotation | Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior

People will debate you if you’re asserting something, whereas if you’re asking for feedback, they won’t be as honest because they don’t want to hurt your feelings.

Content: Quotation | Author: Abhishek Agrawal | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Organizational Behavior

When you are guided by consensus, it often means you are reaching the most vanilla or neutral outcomes.

Content: Quotation | Author: Noah Desai Weiss | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

Alignment is the fundamental challenge with almost every large company. Communication is hard, and people are just busy. But if you can crack the code and keep your organization aligned and focused, it’s like a superpower for velocity.

Content: Quotation | Author: Noah Desai Weiss | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Data can help solve easy problems, but it doesn’t actually solve the hard problems. A hard problem can’t be solved by experimenting your way out of it. You have to figure out if it’s a big swing you want to take. You do that by using intuition.

Content: Quotation | Author: Noah Desai Weiss | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

When appropriate, pay the best middle managers even more than your senior leaders to show how much you value them. If you hear complaints from the executives, make up the difference in equity. Compensation should be commensurate with the value a role creates.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock, Emily Field | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

A clever strategy on paper is only the starting point for engaging those who will implement it. Strategies must also be communicated and understood — and they must motivate action. Most strategy documents and presentations fail miserably when it comes to this last point. […] Strategy stories can provide a powerful bridge between arguments and actions, intentions and results, and strategists and implementers. […] A … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Madeleine Michael, Martin Reeves, Roeland van Straten, Tim Nolan | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Storytelling, Strategy