If You Love Your People, Set Them Free

Winning back disengaged employees will require changing the nature of work itself.

John Ruskin

People are eternally divided into two classes, the believer, builder and praiser, and the unbeliever, destroyer and critic.

Why Training Fails

The main reason training fails is because it isn’t training that is needed. If you want improvement, it is easy to assume the first thing your employee needs is more training but in most cases, you would be wrong. And when you are wrong, the training you provide will likely be a complete waste. Even when you are right, there are myriad reasons why training … [ Read more ]

The Real Life Social Network v2

Paul Adams worked in the UX team at Google and was the user research lead for social. He spend a lot of his time doing research with people on how they use social media, sitting down with people, and having them map out their social network, and looking at how they use tools like email, Facebook, Twitter, their phone, and so on. One of the … [ Read more ]

Managing Interfaces: A Key to Rapid Product and Service Development

We all know that conventional management structures inhibit day-to-day interaction between departments. The problem shows itself when one department hands a project over to another at the end of a phase: “They can’t make what we’ve designed, and Marketing wants something else anyway!“

People from different departments and disciplines often work to different objectives. In an attempt to overcome the barriers to communication, senior managers may … [ Read more ]

Richard Kleinert, Emily Stover DeRocco, Atanu Chaudhuri and Robert Maciejewski

High-performing companies align people management practices to the corporate culture (“cultural fit”) and to the business strategy and long-term objectives of the organization (“strategic fit”). This tight coupling of internal practices, culture and strategy remains unique for each organization and is difficult for competitors to imitate. While rivals can poach a few employees or can try to mimic some strategic moves, rarely will they be … [ Read more ]

Flexible work models: How to bring sustainability to a 24/7 world

Research shows that many more employees would opt for flexible work models if the offerings better met their needs and if they saw visible success stories. For employers, the rewards can be huge: increased employee satisfaction, loyalty and retention. This Bain study investigates how to get this virtuous flywheel going.

Julie Coffman and Russ Hagey

Originally devised to analyze the individual needs of a company’s most-profitable customers, Net Promoter® Score (NPS®) is equally powerful in understanding the work-life requirements of a company’s employees. As opposed to standard “satisfaction inquiries,” NPS reveals people’s willingness to stake their personal reputation on the product, service or organization in question.

Here’s how NPS works: Participants rate the “would recommend” question on a zero-to- 10 … [ Read more ]

Peter Drucker

Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.

How Aha! Really Happens

The theory of intelligent memory suggests that companies relying on conventional creativity tools are getting shortchanged.

If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy, Consider Time

Forget Suze Orman. Time, Not Money, Is Your Most Precious Resource. Spend It Wisely.

Dan Pink

Most twenty-first-century notions of management presume that, in the end, people are pawns rather than players. Management still revolves largely around supervision, if-then rewards, and other forms of control. That’s true even of the kinder, gentler Motivation 2.1 approach that whispers sweetly about things like empowerment and flexibility. Flexibility simply widens the fences and occasionally opens the gates. It is little more than control in … [ Read more ]

Status Ambivalence Inhibits Change

Social Scientist John Jost studies the beliefs and ideologies that justify our status in the world, whether it be high or low. In recent research, Jost has merged two longstanding but contradictory theories about how disadvantaged minorities view themselves. A concept Jost calls “attitudinal ambivalence” explains why members of low-status groups, such as African Americans or women, can be both proud and ashamed of who … [ Read more ]

Mark Nadler

Any genuine shift in strategy implies a change in emphasis; it might involve different customers or markets, new technologies or business processes, unfamiliar leadership styles or management techniques. This requires that leaders learn new skills and master new approaches—a big challenge in itself. Even more problematic, a new strategy undermines the organization’s political profile in very tangible ways. It alters priorities, resource allocations, and reporting … [ Read more ]

The Five Essential Elements of Wellbeing

What differentiates a thriving life from one spent suffering?

Dan Ariely on Irrationality in the Workplace

The behavioral economist explains why executives need to recognize—and embrace—the irrational forces that affect themselves and their employees.

Jon Katzenbach

In the early 1900s, a thoughtful organizational thinker named Mary Parker Follett called out the critical difference between compromise and integration. A team that compromises has settled for the lowest common denominator: a solution, no matter how incomplete, to which all can easily agree, just to move things forward. Compromised solutions made in this way are more likely to break down.

A team that integrates, by … [ Read more ]

Jon Katzenbach

A real team, in my view, is something very specific. It differs from the more common “single-leader unit” in three important ways. First, all members of a real team have an equal level of emotional commitment to the team’s purpose and goals. Second, the leadership role shifts easily among the members based on the skills and experience they have and the challenges of the moment, … [ Read more ]

Collaborating Means Communicating

A partnership changes every time counterparts communicate — or fail to do so.