The research and consulting firm, BlessingWhite, is currently offering a complimentary 2 1/2 hour session, called “Impacting Engagement in 2011: The Leader’s Role,” in many major cities around the U.S. Here they reveal an advance peek at the results of their brand new global survey on employee engagement. Check out the time and location in…
Prior to the 20th Century, millions of people died from diseases that could have been easily cured by an antibiotic like penicillin. For years, the world’s leading bacteriologists had searched for the missing piece to this medical puzzle. Many times they were looking right at it. But they always “saw” the penicillin mold as a…
The most powerful force in creating (or maintaining) organizational culture in work-groups is the personality and philosophy of life of the manager who leads the work-group. Traditional approaches to managing conflict in work-groups tend to view all members of a work-group as “equal,” but the influence of the work-group manager must be more heavily weighted…
Boston Consulting Group, in conjunction with an association of people management associations worldwide, completed a comprehensive on-line + live interviews study on how they are approaching strategic human capital development for the next decade. It’s called “Creating People Advantage 2010” and worth downloading if you are concerned with the strategic element of human resources in…
Organizational culture and theoretical entities like electrons have some important things in common. First, the actual entities themselves are in principle invisible to the naked eye so while their “reality” has often been debated and doubted, the affects they have on things that can be seen and measured are very, very real – only a…
Hewitt Associates have come out with another informative study, called The Current State of Performance Management and Career Development 2010. They surveyed HR professionals from 193 employers. On the performance side, it looks at how companies are using performance goals (the “what”) and behavioral competencies (the “how”) in their year end performance assessment process. Here…
While most people think of organizational culture in broad, sociological terms, field experience has shown that one of the fundamental building blocks of organizational culture is patterns-of-interaction between small-groups of 2s, 3s, and 4s. Most managers in an organization know that effectively leading a work-group takes an enormous amount of time and energy because they…
Trust is the foundation of all human interactions, and the cornerstone upon which high-performing organizational cultures are built. The Organizational Trust Index™ was developed by the Breckenridge Institute® as a method for measuring the level of trust in an organization and the degree to which an organization’s culture is either motivated by trust or driven…
I recently attended a “Leadership Briefing” presentation, organized by Leadership Fairfax, which featured two stimulating Towers Watson consultants, Max Caldwell and Jennifer Meder. The latest TW research is revealing that to generate a climate where your employees contribute at a consistently a high level of their capacity, you need more that just “engagement.” You must…
The purpose of culture (any culture) is to teach people how to “see” the world. More specifically, organizational culture is created, reinforced, promulgated, and maintained through the powerful See-Do-Get Process® where managers and staff members are “taught” how to see themselves, other people, and the world around them. For example, a customer (Curt) walks into…
Studies have shown that the forces, trends, and pace of the business environment have the single greatest influence on shaping organizational culture. But there are even more global forces affecting the business environment in subtle, but profound ways that define how organizations must interact with customers and respond to competitors in order to achieve sustained…
Today’s business literature is replete with models of leadership and an entire industry has grown up around coaching leaders. Leadership is arguably one of the most valuable of human activities, yet despite the vast literature on the topic, many people remain unable to identify the basic building blocks that define what leadership is. As Elliot…
I’ve been approached by a prospective client who wants a workshop as part of an internal strategic initiative around communications between the levels. They want to focus on: 2-way communication, down to the employee and upward to the manager what should be communicated and when obstacles to communicating more openly how to solicit communication from…
A few months ago, we had the wonderful pleasure of spending a day interviewing 11 people at Oak Ridge Hotel & Conference Center to try to uncover their secret – because they have gotten the formula right on employee motivation. Anyone who has ever stepped into their facility outside of Minneapolis can attest to the customer service mentality that every employee exhibits – from the front desk, to housekeeping, to the chefs, groundskeepers, and even in accounting.
There is a definite difference in how the majority of these employees “show up” at their job everyday and how they view and take care of their “guests”. They are truly a company that is doing something right. Here is a quick overview of some of the findings we found:
Ground-breaking studies like Jim Collins’ books, Built to Last and Good to Great and John Kotter’s book, Corporate Culture and Performance have shown that while an organization’s culture powerfully molds its operating style and can positively (or negatively) affect the performance of work-groups and entire organizations culture has remained an overly-complex and somewhat mysterious topic…
You see, telling a story about incentive compensation and creating captivating visuals to convey that information isn’t easy. It requires that we make choices about what information we share. It means that we may have to simplify the message. It may mean changing how we present and what types of communication that we use.
More than 40 percent of the leaders in our surveys say they spend too little time working with individuals to help them unlock their creative energies. Asking yourself, “Have I found my own creative flow? Am I helping other people find their creative flow?” Take this free work survey to assess your organizational strengths and…
Leading at Light Speed is a powerful leadership book by Eric Douglas for businesses, public agencies, and nonprofits revealing the 10 Quantum Leaps to build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization. Quantum Leap #6 is all about how to Stimulate the Creative Flow. With rare exception, teams and work groups should be empowered…
Think back to a time, and it may even be right now, that you were in a slump, no desire to do a whole lot and not quite sure what will get you going again. It is times like these where looking at the situation from a different perspective can help you get unstuck and…
When you walked into the office this morning was the general climate a positive or negative one? It seems that when I speak with my friends and former co-workers that their work environments are increasingly toxic with negativity. Who is responsible for this onslaught of emotional crud? Is it the leaders in the organization, the…