3590 Posts Found

In thinking about change, I like to use a simple three-part framework: capturing attention, securing approval, and orchestrating adoption. Like any simplifying framework, this has limitations. But it has one primary benefit: It emphasizes the need to go slow to go fast. What do I mean? Investing sufficient time and effort to gain attention and secure approval will increase the likelihood that organizations will adopt … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Susan Cramm | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Change Management, Management, Organizational Behavior

No organization is perfect and there will always be flawed people who make bad decisions or take ill-advised actions. But the more comfortable the many good people in your company become at telling truth to power and the better the powerful become at hearing it, the less likely you are to confront an uncomfortable truth about your organization in the headlines. Resolve the small issues … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Eric McNulty | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Accountability, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

It can be easy to reduce malfeasance to the acts of a few bad apples. This kind of thinking absolves the organization, and even the larger system, of blame — it’s a comfortable place for those invested in the status quo. I take a lesson from a healthcare system where I conducted a number of interviews earlier this year. Their quality ratings had gone from … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Eric McNulty | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Accountability, Best Practices, Management

At a deep level, no matter where we come from, we are driven by common physiological and psychological needs and motivations. Yet the culture in which we grow up in has a significant bearing on the ways we see communication patterns as effective or undesirable, to find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, to consider certain ways of making decisions or measuring time “natural” or … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Erin Meyer | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Culture, Decision Making, International, Personality / Behavior, Thought

The functional model of organizations is an important reason why so many companies struggle with the gap between strategy and execution. It makes a company good at many things, but great at nothing. When functional boundaries prevail, there is no construct for managing capabilities. It isn’t clear who owns the capabilities, how to track spending on them, or how to connect them to the strategy … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Cesare R. Mainardi, Paul Leinwand | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Mind-sets, as we define them, have three elements that largely govern human behavior: thoughts and feelings, values and beliefs, and personal emotional needs (both met and unmet).

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jonathan Davidson, Marc Beaujean, Stacey Madge | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Personality / Behavior

Don’t compromise on the quality of people you hire. Everyone knows this, and yet everyone compromises on this at some point during a desperate need. Everyone goes on to regret it, and it sometimes almost kills the company. Good and bad people are both infectious, and if you start with mediocre people, the average does not usually trend up. […] Finally, fire quickly. Everyone knows … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sam Altman | Subjects: Culture, Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior

People’s experience at work is determined by their manager, and the experience of managers is determined by those who manage them, going all the way up to senior leaders….Leaders who are optimistic about what their people can accomplish, and see challenge through the lens of opportunity, inspire confidence throughout the organization.

Content: Quotation | Author: Beverly Kaye | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

Transformational change is still hard, according to a new survey. But a focus on communicating, leading by example, engaging employees, and continuously improving can triple the odds of success.

Content: Article | Authors: Angelika Reich, Dana Maor, David Jacquemont | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

Debiasing techniques […] aim to limit the effects of overconfidence by forcing the decision maker to consider downside risks that may have been overlooked or underestimated. And they can mitigate the dangers of confirmation bias by encouraging executives to consider different points of view.

Examples of such techniques include either the systematic use of a devil’s advocate or a “premortem” (individuals project themselves into a future … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Olivier Sibony, Philip Meissner, Torsten Wulf | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

Functional silos almost assure suboptimal outcomes. Most business processes cross functional boundaries. One example is order to cash: sales receives an order, logistics undertakes fulfillment, and finance handles invoicing and cash. Managing a process through separate silos almost guarantees complexity. It creates internal inconsistencies and punishes the customer with foreseeable mistakes. There are exceptions, of course. One is the supply chain, which in many multinational … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Pascal Visée | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Operations, Organizational Behavior

While there is nothing wrong with matrix organizations per se, they do place particularly heavy demands on the coordination of core functions such as R&D, marketing, and sales, as well as support functions such as finance, IT, and HR. Each function generally has four responsibilities: setting and executing a company’s strategy for that function, managing its area of expertise, partnering with the rest of the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Pascal Visée | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Organizational Behavior

In most cases, when managers joke with their employees, it’s no laughing matter.

Content: Article | Author: Matt Palmquist | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Managers have to live with the results the people on their teams produce, so managers should be empowered to make relevant decisions and held responsible for outcomes. If HR constrains decisions too closely—by determining who should be hired, how much they get paid, or their performance ratings—managers no longer have the freedom to obtain the results they desire. In that case, it is neither logical … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter L. Allen | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Accountability, Human Resources, Management

Could differences in how women and men articulate ambition early in their careers play a role in determining what opportunities come their way?

Content: Article | Author: Sally Helgesen | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Women in Business

Running a start-up is profoundly different than running a big company. When you’re small, founders are close to the action and can make sure all the important things happen. But as a start-up scales, founders can’t have their hands in everything: many companies lose focus on the customer; decisions get bogged down; and there are hiring mistakes. We’ve all seen these things happen to good … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Boris Wertz | Source: Venture One | Subjects: Culture, Entrepreneurship | Company: Amazon.com Inc.

The strength of cross-cultural teams is their diversity of experience, perspective, and insight. But to capture those riches, colleagues must commit to open communication; they must dare to share. Unfortunately, this is rarely easy. In the 25 years we’ve spent researching global work groups, we’ve found that challenges typically arise in three areas.

Content: Article | Author: Ginka Toegel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Culture, International, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.

Content: Case Study | Authors: David Streitfeld, Jodi Kantor | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior | Company: Amazon.com Inc.

Matrices are often necessary, but they may create uncomfortable ambiguity for employees. Clarifying roles can boost both the engagement of the workforce and a company’s organizational health.

Content: Article | Authors: Jim Harter, Michael Bazigos | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Stanford Graduate School of Business PhD alum Kathleen Eisenhardt, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Engineering, studied how product development teams burdened by a complicated set of rules frequently derail while teams with no rules at all never even get started.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Kathleen M. Eisenhardt | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork