Tag Archives: management

Your Team’s Time Management Problem Might Be a Focus Problem

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by Maura Thomas

iStock_000004877664XSmall - Copy“My team has a time management problem,” leaders often tell me. For example, an executive might say that their teams aren’t moving the needle on important projects, yet staffers seem busy and stressed. “Time management” becomes a catchall solution to this problem, and they want to hire me to offer tips and techniques on things like prioritizing and using their calendars better.

What we soon uncover, however, is that the root of their team’s problems is not managing time, but managing attention. And these attention management issues are due not to a skills gap on the part of the employees, but to a wider cultural problem unintentionally reinforced, or at least tolerated, by senior leadership.

Distraction is one of the biggest hurdles to high-quality knowledge work, costing almost 1 trillion dollars annually. The first step to addressing this problem is to treat it as a company culture problem that deserves the attention of senior executives.

In my experience, many leaders inadvertently allow or even actively promote the following four situations that impede their team’s ability to focus and produce their best work. Continue reading →

Seven new onboarding strategies you’ll see this year

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iStock_000012204568LargeAccording to a study from Equifax, more than half of all employees who left their job in the past year did so within the first 12 months.

To counter this problem, more and more companies are turning their efforts toward retention, and that starts with onboarding. Recently, we asked members of Forbes Coaches Council to describe new onboarding strategies companies will be using this year. Here’s what they said.

1. Purposefully Introducing Candidates To Workplace Culture

New employees are often unfamiliar with the cultural nuances of a novel workplace environment. Companies now realize providing clear guidance on culture and how to maximize an employee’s success within it as a strategic priority. Also, because many “rules of the road” are often policy-based and not found in a handbook, discussions on culture will likely escalate to enhance the onboarding process. – Karima Mariama-Arthur, Esq., WordSmithRapport Continue reading →

Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills

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by Dave Winsborough and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

At the start of 2016 Google announced that it had discovered the secret ingredients for the perfect team. After years of analyzing interviews and data from more than 100 teams, it found that the drivers of effective team performance are the group’s average level of emotional intelligence and a high degree of communication between members. Google’s recipe of being nice and joining in makes perfect sense (and is hardly counter intuitive).

Perhaps more surprising, Google’s research implies that the kinds of people in the team are not so relevant. While that may be true at Google, a company where people are preselected on the basis of their personality (or “Googliness”), this finding is inconsistent with the wider scientific evidence, which indicates quite clearly that individuals’ personalities play a significant role in determining team performance. In particular, personality affects:

  • What role you have within the team
  • How you interact with the rest of the team
  • Whether your values (core beliefs) align with the team’s

Continue reading →

How will leadership change in the cognitive era?

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by Chris Cancialosi, Ph.DChris-Cancialosi_avatar_1459267712-400x400

Technological innovation is continuing to accelerate on a hockey stick growth curve. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon are bringing cognitive computing capability to the masses.

And it’s only a matter of time until nearly every aspect of our work and personal lives are impacted.

These advances are still relatively new. Time will tell when and how they change things, but it will happen, and it will happen quickly. In a recent article, Steve Denning reminds us that a repeating pattern of massive transformation has occurred regularly over the last 250 years.

With massive change at our doorstep, now is the time to begin a collective discussion to help leaders navigate this new age. Continue reading →

Leadership styles must change in the new era of “always on” transformation

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photo 1by Lars Fæste and Jim Hemerling

In the face of disruptive technologies, globalization, and a volatile marketplace, leading companies are committing to a new kind of transformation.

Instead of pursuing it as a onetime, crisis-driven initiative and instead of focusing primarily on cutting costs, they are committing to “always on” transformation — profoundly changing their strategy, business model, operating model, people, and organization on an ongoing basis in order to stay ahead.

The new approach demands a new kind of leadership — leadership that is not just directive but also inclusive and that has an appetite for risk, says a new e-book published by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Transformation: Delivering and Sustaining Breakthrough Performance draws on the firm’s work in more than 400 transformations that generated a median annual impact exceeding $340 million through cost cuts, revenue increases, the application of capital efficiency levers, and improvements in organizational performance. Continue reading →