What if what’s in their best interest……doesn’t interest them?

May 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment
salad

A very good post appeared on the FastCompany site yesterday, in which author Ginny Whitelaw declared, “Empathy is the most powerful leadership tool.”

There’s not a lot to disagree with in the article. It is, essentially, about Covey’s “seek first to understand” and represents both a practical, and I would say moralistic, way to approach your interactions with others. Seeing things from their point of view is a good thing, of course. It helps you to understand the other person better, so that you can align your message with their concerns. It’s a practical exercise for influencing others in any walks of life where negotiation, compromise, and change are necessary. It also indicates that you have a measure of respect for the other person’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs and opinions.

Unfortunately, there are times when people simply don’t act in a way that is consistent with what is in their best interests. Especially not in the long term. It’s as simple as David Meister’s Fat Smoker principle – you have to go through something difficult to get to something good, so change is hard and rarely happens. [Read more]

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Quick thoughts on the definition of excellence, and the weekly rewind

April 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Excellence

It’s one of those days where what should be, and what is, are at odds with each other again…..

“Excellence” is something that ought to be defined objectively. There ought ot be agree-upon standards for excellence. In some cases there are, such as in sports where Excellence is defined as a team championship. Even then, however, excellence has a subjective interpretation – you might be a batting champion in baseball (meaning you have the highest individual batting average of any player), yet play for a last place team. A super star player might have sub-par statistics due to the poor team that surrounds him or her.

I think, if you ask almost any person, in any role, in any company what excellent means and they will tell you about their experience – and not necessarily about the standards within their profession. This may mean that, in reality, “excellence” becomes a locally-defined phenomenon, which is a mistake. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Operational Excellence, Team Building & Human Capital Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The inexcusable “I just don’t have time” excuse.

April 11, 2012 By 2 Comments
Running_our_of_time_by_joanna5549

Managers who aren’t able to address a problem due to time constraints need to think again about what they consider important. Clearly, you have the time to deal with things – you have simply chosen to ignore one set of problems in favor of another. Are you sitting in boring, mindless, disorganized meetings instead of getting ahead of a problem? Well – that means you value the meeting more than being proactive. I know, I know – you believe you are as proactive as possible and you certainly want to be even more proactive – but the truth is, you wanted to be in that meeting more than anything else. How do I know? Because that’s where you were and actions speak louder than words or wishes. [Read more]

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Let’s all stop being professional, a rhino’s tale

April 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The giant rhino monster

Every time someone with enough rank and a title granting them authority starts to screw up, behave in a foolish or terrible manner, or speak like a fool – we are told that we shouldn’t address the issue because “That wouldn’t be professional.” So, since being professional prevents us from acknowledging there are problems, let’s make a conscious decision to be profoundly un-professional.

What’s at work here is the manifestation of fear. Fear that if I point out there’s an 80,000 pound rhinoceros in the room, someone will make my life difficult, or I’ll lose my job altogether. Which is silly, because the rhinoceros is obvious and it stinks to high heaven. [Read more]

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Unlimited vacation, unlimited responsibility….for management

March 28, 2012 By 2 Comments
working outdoors

The true burden for making unlimited vacation work rests not on the workers for knowing what’s coming down the pipe and, therefore, which days they can take off. The burden rests on low-level managers who are aware of not just the workflow – but also have an emotional connection to the individuals placed within their area of control. The role of management in an environment that supports unlimited vacation is a crucial one. It necessitates that managers have a handle on the value stream and the ability to establish multiple workaround paths and redundancies to ensure work continues no matter who is in the office or on the shop floor. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Business Management, Family, Operational Excellence, Planning & Measurement, Team Building & Human Capital Tagged With: , , , ,

More on kids and the wisdom gained from teaching baseball

March 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

So, it struck me, that when we interview candidates or assign people to tasks based on what they tell us about themselves, we are really only going on that person’s interpretation – which may be very different from our own. Different professions have attempted to make the understanding of the job standardized by instituting certifications and licenses, however, there is still a great deal of variation in the ability to understand and implement those standards. There is still one universal truth – the definition of what constitutes “good” is often developed after the fact and is done so according to subjective interpretations by someone with a need to save face. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Continuous Improvement, Education, Family, Team Building & Human Capital Tagged With: , , , , , ,

ROWE: An attempt at achieving the Lean Ideal?

March 15, 2012 By 4 Comments

In the past few months that I’ve been blogging about ROWE, I have been poking at how the two concepts might help to reinforce each other, with the premise that ROWE-thinking could help to enable Lean-thinking by overcoming the tools-based focus that is so prevalent in Lean implementations and, instead, returning the focus to the culture where I believe it belongs. fter stirring the pot and looking for the common ground between the two, I am now wondering if my original theory – that ROWE could enable Lean – was a bit backwards. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Business Management, Continuous Improvement, Featured Posts, Operational Excellence, Team Building & Human Capital Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Change your assumptions to change everything else

March 6, 2012 By 2 Comments

We pride ourselves on toughness, but not on eliminating the need to be tough. We praise those who struggle, but do little to eliminate the struggle. If you change that flawed assumption – that life is a relentless series of difficulties, punctuated with intermittent moments of levity – and reversed the equation – that life is an endless series of interesting and joyful events, occasionally interrupted with difficulty – how would your attitude towards everything change?
[Read more]

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An All or Nothing Attitude Usually Gets You Nothing

February 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A big trap in leading major improvements is to set massive and sweeping goals with no intermediate steps or sub-goals along the way. Here’s the trap. Because these goals are so massive, it ends up taking forever to just get it started or to generate any measurable results. Consequently, people see little or no progress, they get [...]

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Flexible workplaces – the best in respect for people?

February 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Respect for people extends beyond the workplace and into the personal lives of employees. Certainly, there are a great many people (if not most) who argue that personal concerns have no place in the workplace. If an employer is willing to understand that employees are people, however, and believes that all people have concerns that involve family issues and other areas of fulfillment, that demonstrate a much deeper understanding of just what respect for the individual is. [Read more]

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