Author Archives: Larry Janis

9 Keys to Delegating Successfully

By Sam Warner

For any entrepreneur, particularly when you are starting a new business, there is a danger of trying to do everything yourself. If you like to keep the world under control you may need to improve your delegation skills.

Delegation provides opportunities for people to feel empowered, supported and encouraged. It gives entrepreneurs a chance to reduce stress by spreading the work and sharing responsibilities amongst the team.

Here are my tips for improving delegation and gaining the benefits as your business grows:

1. Get to know your team.
If you have a new team – don’t go in like a bull in a china shop. Get to know your team, understand their ways of working, rules of engagement, foibles, and preferred styles of communication and you’ll be able to appreciate their world as it stands – before you add to it. Really get to grips with their deliverables and their concerns and challenges. These small steps can pay off over time.

2. Share the vision.
Be really clear about your vision and mission and share it with your team. If they understand the direction the team is going in, and the objectives that need to be achieved they will start to think about how they can contribute.

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The Boring Benefits Your Employees Really Want

by Sophie Downs

The pandemic, the grim economy, and the stress of remote work have made employees’ physical, mental, and finan­cial well-being more important than ever. At the same time, bosses are trying to meet their employees’ needs on a tighter budget. One solution? Voluntary benefits.

They’re not as sexy as onsite gyms and free lunches, and the term is a bit of a misnomer. It typically refers to insurance products (separate from health coverage) that workers can buy at lower group rates via payroll deduc­tions. But it can also apply to benefits that are funded all or in part by employers.

Voluntary benefits cover familiar things, like long-term disability care, and novel ones, like legal services, identity theft protection, financial counseling, and veterinary bills. Keep in mind that voluntary benefits are just one piece of a company’s benefits puzzle, and are no substitute for solid health coverage. And offering a new benefit without footing the bill might not come across as particularly generous. But employees appreciate getting insurance cheaper and more conveniently than they could on their own, and these benefits can provide peace of mind by filling coverage gaps and reducing out-of-pocket costs. (One increasingly popular benefit is hospital indemnity insurance, which pays the employee a certain amount for each day of a hospital stay.) Read on for a guide to getting started

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Putting People at the Center of Operations

by Guillaume Roels

The field of operations management has deep roots in developing effective processes for people. How can we encourage further growth in this area?

Operations management (OM), which is often associated with processing widgets and information, has permeated the workplace to such a degree that the HR function at companies like Google is now known as “People Operations”.

As the nature of work has changed over the past generation, becoming more service-oriented, knowledge-intensive, and rapidly changing, a growing stream of OM research has shifted away from manufacturing to managing people – individuals, teams and organisations.

People affect processes and processes affect people. These linkages between people and processes impact performance. People-centric operations (PCO) is how people affect the performance of operational processes; it has always been part of OM but not previously explicitly defined. In a recent paper, Bradley R. Staats and I clarify how this part of OM encompasses several research strands that have been, until recently, marginalised. To shed light on the multiple facets of people-centric operations, we have co-edited an upcoming special issue on the topic in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (M&SOM).

What is PCO?

Unlike the field of organisational behaviour, PCO doesn’t study behaviour solely for its own sake, but rather it studies how behaviour changes the performance of operational processes.

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The Darker Side of Organisational Life

by Michael Jarrett

Cultural change is not for the faint-hearted or the politically correct.

Princess Diana, Sarah Ferguson (Duchess of York), and now Meghan Markle (Duchess of Sussex) share a unique experience. Each revealed the crushing effects and personal ordeal of social exclusion by the royal House of Windsor. They did not fit. They experienced rejection. They became outsiders. In his interview with Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry, the husband of Meghan, said: “What I was seeing was history repeating itself…but far more dangerous because you add race in and social media in.” It begs the question: What is going on at Buckingham Palace?

However, before delving further into the arcane customs and practices of the British royal household, let’s not pretend their institutional routines are unique. As public figures, it is easy to point the finger at the British monarchy. However, I want to suggest that the palace’s antics merely reflect broader social issues. They exemplify the challenges of deeply held beliefs, practices and basic assumptions that bond insiders together and cast others out. Too often, the roots of these patterns go unnoticed, ignored or denied, leading to misconceptions about the problems and inadequate responses to tackle them.

I refer to the organisation’s culture. MIT Sloan’s Edgar Schein defined it as “a pattern of basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.” Basic assumptions relate to the taken for granted, deeply embedded, unconsciously held shared beliefs by organisational groups. They are so taken for granted that “someone who does not hold them is viewed as a ‘foreigner’ or as ‘crazy’ and is automatically dismissed.”

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The Fundamentals of Transforming from Matrix to Agile

by Yves Doz

Nothing less than an evolution of strategy, structure, processes, people and technology will do.

Although it remains a common way to structure an organisation, the matrix is increasingly showing its weaknesses in the digital economy. Born in the 1960s and popularised in the 1970s, the matrix organises employees into grids, with each employee answering to at least two managers – functional, product or project, divisional or geographical. The matrix was envisioned to break down silos, foster lateral coordination and improve efficiency. In an era of rapid but steady productivity and economic growth, it soon became the norm across industries, with giant corporations such as Citibank, General Electric and Texas Instruments jumping on the matrix bandwagon.

But the matrix’s heyday appears to be over in the age of disruption, not least for businesses in fast-evolving sectors. Motorola and Eastman Kodak come to mind, but perhaps no other company offers a more salutary example than Nokia, once the world’s dominant mobile phone maker.

In 2003, as its early innovative drive flagged and competitors caught up, Nokia restructured itself along matrix principles into business groups – multimedia, mobile phones and enterprise solutions – and further among customer uses and lifestyles. It was hoped that the market-facing business groups would be entrepreneurial, but also share the company’s resources (e.g. technology platforms, operating systems and software development, manufacturing, logistics and distribution) as they created differentiated products.

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