3605 Posts Found

How important is retaining and engaging your teams? On a one-to-ten scale most of you would probably say ten. But while managers are held really accountable for [sales or revenue] metrics, they’re not held so accountable for retention and engagement. Yet 70 percent of how engaged your people are and whether or not they stay is about their boss— not about HR or employee programs. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

At the founding of a startup, the structure of the company is flat. Everyone is effectively a peer. At about 8 people, a leader must emerge to shepherd the growing team, and so the first management layer is created. Then again, somewhere around 60 employees, the company must add another management layer, and then again when the company reaches a few hundred employees.

This pattern … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Tomasz Tunguz | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior

Sometimes, I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don’t act on it, your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention and that is the beginning of the end.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bill Gates | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.

Content: Quotation | Author: David Ogilvy | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Marketing / Sales

Leaders must hone their ability to sort through the various motivations. Most chief executives learn to ask themselves these three questions:
1. Who’s telling me what they think I want to hear?
2. Who’s not telling me what I need to hear because they are being deferential?
3. Who’s telling me what they want me to hear because it serves their own agenda?

Content: Quotation | Author: Thomas J. Saporito | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Communication, Leadership, Trust

What gets talked about in your company, how it gets talked about and who is invited to the conversation determines what will happen. Or won’t happen. Your conversations must be fierce—conversations in which you and others come out from behind yourselves, into your conversations, and make them real. Once an organization crosses the line into “fierce” territory, very little else is required to create a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Susan Scott | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

After more than 50 years of trying, the search for an ideal model of the global organization remains elusive. But intriguing new experiments are under way.

Content: Article | Authors: Aaron De Smet, Suzanne Heywood, Wouter Aghina | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: International, Management, Organizational Behavior

Subjective evaluation by supervisors can address the shortcomings of numeric measures. When numeric measures focus employees on one goal, a second, subjective bonus can make employees pay more attention to other objectives that may be difficult to quantify, like managing controllable risks. If a plant manager’s bonus depends on profits alone, he might postpone maintaining equipment. A supervisor can motivate the plant manager to consider … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Hal Weitzman, Michael Gibbs, Vanessa Sumo | Source: Capital Ideas | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

If you haven’t read the book Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, by Stanford business school professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, you are missing out. Pfeffer lambasts the leadership development industry — including business schools, human resource departments, authors, and leadership programs and coaches — for being clueless about the harsh political realities of the workplace, and for promoting behaviors that are … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jeffrey Pfeffer, Susan Cramm | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Leadership, Organizational Behavior

The way we are conditioned to see the world in our own culture seems obvious and commonplace. To maximise a multicultural team, managers should identify what is typical in their culture but different from others to open a dialogue of sharing, learning and understanding.

Content: Article | Author: Erin Meyer | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The experience of … entrepreneurs reflects an unfortunate reality: companies are set up to perform. They are not set up to produce. If they were more capable at producing, they would not have to worry about combating disruption from outside. They would already be skilled at redesigning, disrupting, and innovating from within.

Content: Quotation | Authors: John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Organizational Behavior

As a rule, large organizations do a poor job of distinguishing between high-profile roles that require a top professional skilled at optimizing a known space (a performer) and roles that require one skilled at redefining or disrupting that space (a producer). If your company is performer-centric, all successful activity looks like performance, and all roles look like performers’ roles. You may be wasting your best … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

During the past 40 years, a powerful and practical theory of personal growth and development — one based on the evolution of human systems — has emerged. Known as the “levels of human existence” theory, it states that people grow in fits and starts, alternating long periods of stasis with abrupt expansions of their empathy and capabilities. You can track the growth of individuals this … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: David Hudnut | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Career, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

Organizations need to pay individuals for their skills and knowledge, not for their jobs. In a work situation in which people have changing task assignments, paying the person according to their market value is much more effective than paying the job, particularly when it comes to retaining the right people. When all is said and done, it is people that have a market value, not … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Christopher G. Worley, Edward E. Lawler III | Source: University of Southern California | Subjects: Change Management, Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Behind all financial failures is organizational failure.

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

In multinationals with subsidiaries scattered around the world, communication is key – and complex. So what’s the best way to get firm knowledge flowing in the right directions? A large scale survey of over 800 subsidiaries in 13 countries finds that the relatively novel trend of “inpatriation” may be more useful to businesses than the traditional expat assignments for two-way knowledge flow.

Content: Article | Authors: Anne-Wil Harzing, B. Sebastian Reiche, Markus Pudelko | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Human Resources, International, Management, Organizational Behavior

The effectiveness of a company’s problem solving, as measured along the dimensions of cost, speed, and accuracy, is influenced by five elements: strategy (that is, the core of the company’s problem-solving approach, which drives decisions about the other elements), framing, data selection, choice and implementation of a solution method, and selection of problem solvers. Classical enterprises typically lack a strategy for problem solving. They try … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jussi Lehtinen, Martin Reeves | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Problems / Solutions

Creating a great culture, finding the right people, managing them to do great things, and solving problems creatively and systematically are challenges faced by all organizations. What differentiates [organizations] is how they approach these challenges.

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Culture, Management, Organizational Behavior

Success in the past always becomes enshrined in the present by the over-valuation of the policies and attitudes which accompanied that success.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bruce D. Henderson | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Success / Failure

Billions of dollars are spent annually on leadership development programs, but virtually all of this investment is spent on the same formulaic training model and black-and-white metrics. With their focus almost exclusively on classroom learning and lockstep generic curriculums, these dinosaurs of training simply don’t have what it takes to develop the next generation of leaders, managers and employees.

Content: Article | Author: Marcus Buckingham | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Human Resources, Leadership, Organizational Behavior