What does the name Thomas Wilson mean to you?
Probably not much. But over a decade ago, this young man created a groundswell of change in a massive Federal organization that altered thousands of lives for the better; including mine.
How did he do it? And what can we learn from his story about creating large-scale change from the bottom up?
Newsflash: People aren’t possessions. So why do we insist on treating workers like commodities?
Once upon a time, employees and companies enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship. Workers stayed with one company for their entire careers, taking pride in their output and putting their noses to the grindstone for the sake of the organization. In return, companies offered pension plans, training, development opportunities, and reasonable work hours.
While those days might seem like distant memories, the churn-and-burn mentality of the modern workplace isn’t sustainable.
Written by Paula Mulford
Letting your guard down basically boils down to one thing… being appropriately vulnerable in your communication, which in turn promotes a culture of trust. This diagram is a simple visual showing a different way to achieve effective management and stronger leadership.
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.
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.
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