By Kevin Eikenberry
It is one of those buzzwords, created by and repeated by consultants and “experts” (people like me). They pick a word or phrase and use it so much it gets a life of its own. And whatever relevance it had to begin with is lost in the faint nodding of heads (because everyone is supposed to agree) or the rolling of the eyes (because people are tired of that buzzword).
The buzzword of the day is transparency. Continue reading
by Phanish Puranam
Self-managed teams may sometimes adopt task divisions that are all wrong for the project. Managerial intervention can help avoid this.
Suppose you were on a team tasked with manufacturing a single handmade wooden toy. For this project, a few component objects must be made from scratch and slotted together to form the finished piece. How would you break the project into manageable tasks to be divvied up among the team?
If you’re like most people, your default option would likely be to assign each part of the toy to a different individual or sub-team. We could call this method object-based, because it focuses on separately creating the pieces, or intermediate objects, that later unite to make the whole. Another approach could be to divide the work into activities that apply across all the parts, such as cutting, painting, and varnishing. Without considering the specifics of the project, such as the number of finished pieces needed, or the skills required to make the various parts, it’s impossible to judge which way would be more effective; but one thing is certain; it is unlikely that the object-based division would always be better. Nevertheless the tendency to pick object-based task division regardless of the task can be very powerful. Continue reading
By Leslie Gaines-Ross
When it comes to social media, today’s CEOs have made a remarkable transition over the past five years. A recent analysis by my firm, Weber Shandwick, found that 80% of the chief executive officers of the world’s largest 50 companies are engaged online and on social media. The results, published in “Socializing Your CEO: From Marginal to Mainstream,” show that CEO sociability has more than doubled since we began tracking the social activities of chief executives in 2010, when only 36% of CEOs were social.
We audited a range of sites and platforms to see how CEOs are engaging socially and compared these results to its 2010 and 2012 findings. CEOs are considered “social” if he or she does at least one of the following: has a public and verifiable social network account on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Weibo, or Mixi; engages on the company website through messages, pictures, or video; appears in a video on the company YouTube or YouKu channel; or authors an external blog. Continue reading
by Quy Huy
How a leader manages collective emotions can create or destroy enormous market value. It can also have a huge bearing on what large groups of stakeholders think of you.
One of the reasons Nokia lost the smartphone battle, despite holding a strong position before the iPhone came along, was its lack of speed and inability to react to changing circumstances. As I argued in a previous article, the reason for Nokia’s sluggish reaction was a collective fear among the company’s middle managers, not of the competition, but of losing status and resources within the organization. Continue reading
By Scot Heathman
Nothing develops trust more than vulnerability…great leaders, authentic vulnerable leaders, require the ability to develop deep human connection
Dov Baron,
Author of ‘Fiercely Loyal‘
Just be yourself. How many times have you heard this statement in development sessions or during leadership training? I like this statement but it’s hollow. It’s missing something. Employees and subordinates are demanding leaders to become more authentic instead of just being themselves. Most subordinates know if you try being someone you’re not, especially in a key leadership position, it’s only a matter of time before you’re found out as an imposter. We see this all the time online. People try to be someone else with their online persona versus who they are in real life. It doesn’t work over the long run and you’re setting yourself up for personal disaster. The key is being authentic with your yourself and your organization. Be authentic with your subordinates. It is Authenticity that is the secret sauce in a recipe on developing deep human connections. Continue reading
