David Marquet

One of the problems with the word empowerment is that it is vague. “Empowerment” does not inherently contain the ability to measure and affect it: two necessary components for improving it. What do we say, “Be somewhat more empowered than you used to be?” That’s like saying “Get stronger” and then going to the gym and never knowing how much weight you are pushing.

Christine Porath

In a study of nearly 20,000 employees around the world (conducted with HBR), I found that when it comes to garnering commitment and engagement from employees, there’s one thing that leaders need to demonstrate: respect. No other leadership behavior had a bigger effect on employees across the outcomes we measured. Being treated with respect was more important to employees than recognition and appreciation, communicating an … [ Read more ]

Learn How to Lead Different Types of Individuals With the “DiSC” System

The DiSC behavior assessment is based on the theories of psychologist William Moulton Marston, and it centers on four major behavioral traits that everyone has on some level in the workplace: dominance, influence, steadiness, and compliance. A graphic from Eastern Nazarene College’s business management masters program explains how to determine what behavioral traits your team members have, how they prefer to work and communicate, and … [ Read more ]

Jess Whittlestone

Does following Peters and Waterman’s eight principles guarantee you business success? Almost certainly not. One big problem with their research was that they only looked at successful companies. Knowing that all successful companies have something in common tells us nothing unless we also know that unsuccessful companies lack those things. We might find that all successful business founders displayed an interest in entrepreneurship from an … [ Read more ]

Jess Whittlestone

Though we’re unlikely to ever distill success into a neat formula or set of principles, there is an alternative approach, which might bring more promise. [Jerker] Denrell suggests that rather than trying to demystify success, we should spend more time studying failure, which may come down to much more consistent principles. Understanding what not to do, if based on more solid evidence, could be much … [ Read more ]

Frances Hesselbein

People flourish when they take responsibility. Have you ever met a young person who couldn’t wait to be a subordinate?

This Big Change Was Supposed to Make Performance Reviews Better. Could It Be Making Them Worse?

There’s a revolution going on in corporate human resources departments, and the much-hated annual performance review is in the cross-fire. Over the past few years, a fast-growing number of high-profile companies have been blowing up this annual rite of corporate life, replacing the traditional yearly review with something more frequent, less formal and, they hope — less reviled. But as the uprising gains steam, a … [ Read more ]

Daniel Kahneman’s Strategy for How Your Firm Can Think Smarter

Figuring out how to make the act of decision-making “commensurate with the complexity and importance of the stakes” is a huge problem, in Daniel Kahneman’s view, to which the business world does not devote much thought. At a Wharton conference he described how significant progress can be made in making organizations “more intelligent.”

Joe Folkman

While 70% to 80% of leaders are better off working on their strengths, 20% to 30% of leaders have something called a “fatal flaw.” Most people have weakness. However, fatal flaws are significant weaknesses that have a very negative impact on a person’s career and effectiveness.

Connections, Onboarding and the Need to Belong

Few would disagree that relationships matter. However, when onboarding new employees, many organizations don’t do enough to help them make connections or foster a sense of belonging.

Joakim Ahlström

Running an idea campaign is a popular method for tapping into the creativity of an organization. There is only one problem with them. They kill creativity. If there is an unmet need to be listened to in an organization, an idea campaign might create a surge of ideas, a surge so big that only a fraction of all ideas can be implemented. This means the … [ Read more ]

Phanish Puranam

The fundamental challenge in organizational design is managing the tension between division of labor and integration of efforts. People often make the mistake of emphasizing the former at the expense of the latter. They may devise an organizational structure that contains all the units required to perform desired tasks, but fails to provide the information links between units and the motivational mechanisms necessary … [ Read more ]

Robb Willer: What Makes People Do Good?

How external factors pressure people to cooperate.

Marcus Buckingham

when, as part of your performance appraisal, we ask your boss to rate you on the organization’s required competencies, we do it because of our belief that these ratings reliably reveal how well you are actually doing on these competencies. The competency gaps your boss identifies then become the basis for your Individual Development Plan for next year. The same applies to the widespread use … [ Read more ]

10 Principles of Organizational Culture

Companies can tap their natural advantage when they focus on changing a few important behaviors, enlist informal leaders, and harness the power of employees’ emotions.

Strengths-Based Coaching Can Actually Weaken You

In the past decade, there has been much enthusiasm for the idea that behavioral change interventions are most effective when they focus exclusively on enhancing people’s inherent strengths, as opposed to also addressing their weaknesses. Although there are no reasons to expect the fascination with strengths to wane any time soon, organizations — and people — would be better off if it did. There are … [ Read more ]

Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini

Today’s organizations were simply never designed to change proactively and deeply—they were built for discipline and efficiency, enforced through hierarchy and routinization. As a result, there’s a mismatch between the pace of change in the external environment and the fastest possible pace of change at most organizations. If it were otherwise, we wouldn’t see so many incumbents struggling to intercept the future.

Tom Peters

Organizational restructuring is no longer the answer—if it ever was—to the most difficult problems of shifting organizational focus. Indeed, the shape of the organization chart is less and less relevant to their solution.

Tom Peters

Given a realistic commitment to implementation, structural reorganization along functional or divisional lines has worked out successfully in many companies. This is to be expected, since the concepts of functional dominance and product-line autonomy are fair approximations of what actually goes on in functional and divisional organizations respectively. Indeed, in the latter case the structure often fits the basic strategy like a glove; hence its … [ Read more ]

Josh Bersin

A … key engagement driver is the need for continuous and ongoing recognition. As soft as it seems, saying “thank you” is an extraordinary tool to building an engaged team. We studied this topic and found that “high-recognition companies” have 31 percent lower voluntary turnover than companies with poor recognition cultures. These companies build a culture of recognition through social reward systems (tools that give … [ Read more ]