3605 Posts Found

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

Most internal organizational barriers result from complexity and bureaucracy that has accumulated as leaders scaled up their businesses. We call this dynamic the “Growth Paradox:” Growth creates complexity and yet complexity is the number one killer of profitable growth. You cannot win on the outside, in the marketplace, if you are losing on the inside, with an organization stifled by its own growth. But what … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Chris Zook | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The state of workplaces, not just in the U.S. but all over the world, can only be described as dire. Whether you prefer Gallup’s data on employee engagement or the surveys on engagement or job satisfaction emanating from the various human resource consulting firms and the Conference Board, the picture that emerges is consistent: mostly disengaged, dissatisfied, disaffected employees. Moreover, there is no evidence that … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jeffrey Pfeffer | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Leadership, Organizational Behavior

When we lose confidence that people have the will to do the right thing, and we turn to incentives, we find that we get what we pay for. […] There is really no substitute for the integrity that inspires people to do good work because they want to do good work. And the more we rely on incentives as substitutes for integrity, the more we … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Barry Schwartz | Source: Brain Pickings | Subjects: Human Resources, Integrity, Management, Motivation, Organizational Behavior

Bestselling author and Wharton professor Adam Grant has spent years researching and interviewing originals. In this interview, Grant explains why it’s imperative for early-stage companies to hire originals. He shares how he singles them out and delves into recommended questions and exercises that can help startups find and hire them.

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Adam Grant | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

leaders have to recognize that everything people do makes sense from their perspective, and that everyone can provide value in the right context. Someone who seems rigid is actually someone you can count on, somebody stable. If she seems impulsive, she’s spontaneous. If he seems gullible, he also promotes trust and candor.

If you’re a leader, once you recognize this, not only do you end up … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ellen Langer | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior