Cooperative Results

There is no shortage of approaches toward time management ranging from strategies to tactics. The general approach is to be clear about your intended result, break this down into pieces and schedule it into your calendar.

The one aspect of time management rarely mentioned has to do with what you actually control and influence – and what you don’t.

It makes a lot of sense to ultimately schedule in calendar time working ONLY on what you control and letting go of what you don’t control.

What’s the old Story?

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Organizations looking at their long term future clearly recognize that:

• Change on a significant scale has happened in the past and will continue to happen. Changes are prompted by a variety of fluctuating conditions including new technologies, competitor changes, economic conditions, leadership changes, customer sentiment and regulatory changes. Having an illusion of impending stability will lead to playing the game of constant catch-up.
• The capabilities of an organization’s workforce need to continually change as the landscape changes. In general, people at lower levels such as individual contributors add new skills associated with technology changes, enhanced teamwork, and more effective interpersonal skills. At more senior levels, skill enhancements often come from broader experiences, greater awareness of the bigger picture, leading and managing large organizations, grounded decision-making skills, and positive influence skills.

Clearly a company must have ways to enhance its collective capabilities to deliver great products and services while experiencing and adapting to continual and abrupt changes. Companies address this challenge by finding the right balance between hiring people from outside the company and developing people from within. Continue reading →

Research outlined in my Development Strategies blog indicated that the number one factor for developing leaders is having a variety of experiences in multiple functions, organizations, companies, industries, countries, and cultures.

The Concept is Simple

The concept is straightforward. Identify your “pipeline” of future leaders and ensure that they have a specific variety of experiences which will prepare them for future top leadership roles. Organizations often refer to this process as succession managent or succession planning.  When asking most senior executives how well this process works, they will often say, “There must be a better way” or “It’s too complicated and burdensome.”

Conceptually, organizations consciously want to move people periodically into new positions and experiences which offer the individuals opportunities for further development, bringing a fresh perspective to the position, and delivering the results expected from senior leadership.

The Conventional Implementation Is Not Simple

This is not quite so easy in practice because: Continue reading →

I wonder how many organizations feel good about their performance management system?

The theory makes sense: develop and track accomplishment of goals; create and track development goals; receive a periodic salary adjustment based on progress from the first two items.

So why is this often such a painful, time-consuming, and demoralizing process? Continue reading →

Organizations are continuously going through significant change – and the size, intensity and frequency of these changes are rapidly growing.

Organizations have patterns in navigating change. Many of these patterns came from educational training in engineering and business. For example, past business experience with a command and control mentality makes it tempting for leaders to think, “Hey, I’m paying you to get a job done. This is what needs to be done. Now go and do it.” While this may be technically true, positively motivated employees will implement change which is more effective and longer lasting.

In general, the change pattern in business is to get a team together to develop a plan and implement it as quickly as is reasonable. Outside consultants are often hired to give the effort more credibility and ensure a higher probability of success.

The part that is generally not given enough serious attention is getting the people who will be affected by the change to be involved in its design and implementation. This is often not attempted because it seems like an unnecessary and messy complication. Besides, outside consultants with more experience in these types of changes will come up with a more optimal solution. Right? Continue reading →

Organizations facing change often look at their patterned behaviors (culture) and realize that some of these behaviors don’t match those needed to have a competitive edge.

Case Study

To illustrate this, I will use an example of a power generation and distribution company. On one hand, this company already has a culture which is very safety conscious, methodical, detailed in their planning, pragmatic, and conservative. This pattern has helped them be very reliable and safe, which is what their customers demand.

But what happens when competition is growing in the generation part of their business? This requires an adjustment in culture toward that which is faster moving, more innovative, has more tolerance for more unknowns in terms of finances, and incorporates a willingness to experiment with out-of-the-box trends such as decentralization of power generation and construction of renewable power generation. Yet is is still critical that a culture of safety and reliability remain very strong.

Certainly we don’t want the nuclear plant operators to suddenly become more innovative and experimental, nor do we want this for the employees working on transmission and distribution lines which operate at thousands of volts. Continue reading →