Guest article written by Levi Nieminen, Ph.D.
There are six small words that every business leader – really every person – ought to build into their everyday vernacular: How are we making this decision?
Office existence is strewn with examples of decision confusion. One person thinks the decision has already been made, while a second person thinks he’s waiting on the approval of a third who has no idea she’s the “decider.” Cue the Dilbert cartoon.
The topic of leadership is so fascinating and vastly studied these days; it’s not surprising that the field of leadership development has grown exponentially over the past few decades. Qualities of great leaders are studied, as is emotional intelligence and how successful leaders can work with it.
The topic that hasn’t received as much traction yet, however, is overconfidence in leadership, and how detrimental it can be for organizational health.
Stereotypically, great leaders are charismatic and confident.
“Hey, what’s wrong with that?”, you may wonder. “They’re real go-getters. Not afraid to take risks.”
This may be true, but there is also merit in recognizing that many great leaders are simply not the most charismatic. In fact, though confidence may be necessary in certain instances, it is overconfidence that becomes dangerous and negates good leadership qualities.
We’ve all read the stories about startups making waves in their industry, and how they’re doing it from a once-destitute warehouse on the south side of town. We’re prone to conclude that these companies are sustaining high performance because they’ve broken down the (cubicle) walls that bind our ability to collaborate, innovate, and achieve our full potential.
Unfortunately, misconceptions about high performing culture develop from these stories, and many well-intentioned business leaders have tried to emulate these startups in their quest to improve their culture and performance.
As the saying goes, even the longest journey starts with just one step.
Over the years, we’ve engaged with many clients who are dedicated to creating large-scale, significant, and sustainable culture change in their organizations in an effort to drive success. Unfortunately, many of these well-intentioned executives believe there is a silver bullet—some grand gesture of change—that will accomplish their goals.
While significant changes can and do drive sustainable performance improvements, truly transformational change results from a few deceptively simple things.
Written by Shawn Parr
Get on a Southwest flight to anywhere, buy shoes from Zappos.com, pants from Nordstrom, groceries from Whole Foods, anything from Costco, a Starbucks espresso, or a Double-Double from In N’ Out, and you’ll get a taste of these brands’ vibrant cultures.
Culture is a balanced blend of human psychology, attitudes, actions, and beliefs that combine to create either pleasure or pain, serious momentum or miserable stagnation. A strong culture flourishes with a clear set of values and norms that actively guide the way a company operates. Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy.
As we explored in my last article, The Martian, by Andy Weir, provides a dramatic parallel to some of our most challenging professional situations. We previously talked about empowering our teams and people. In this article, we’ll focus on the remaining two business questions we posed:
How important is our ability to solve problems and depend on our individual skills and strengths? And how critical is our investment not only in our teams but in each individual?
There are very few leadership transitions like being a newly commissioned officer in the military.
Typically, on graduation day from a military academy, ROTC program or Officer Candidate School program, young men and women in their twenties pin on second lieutenant bars and immediately find themselves in charge of huge teams and millions of dollars of equipment in one of the harshest working environments imaginable.
Written by Alf Rehn
There are many ways to destroy a culture. It can be destroyed by arrogance, hypocrisy or hubris. It can be demolished through bad leadership, nepotism, unchecked misogyny or other unethical practices.
But, a pervasive lack of care might be the most effective way to destroy a culture. Whereas the list of sins above is obvious pathologies of an organization in decay, they are visible, and often manageable, vices. We tend to pay a lot of attention to these vices as they, by way of their visibility, draw our eye. And we tend to overestimate their importance as we underestimate the small things in our organizations.
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 relatively 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.
Trust is a fickle thing. It takes time to build and can be destroyed in a heartbeat. In the workplace, trust is undeniably important. The level of trust an employee has for his or her peers and leadership often defines the line between a happy, engaged worker and an unproductive body filling a cubicle chair.
Yes, trust is a critical component of every successful workplace culture. So why is it so difficult to achieve?
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