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Sure, we'd all love to sit down for a nice 45 minute chat with everyone on the team if we could, but most of us don't even get to do that with the people we love in our life. At work, people are over-busy and overwhelmed. Meetings fill the day, and emails clog our inbox. And there's work to do as well.
Don't despair. Coaching's something everyone can do, do quickly, and do in a way that will have a significant impact on performance and satisfaction. But to make it work for the time-crunched manager, you need to follow three principles.
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"Change is inevitable. Whether we're talking about business, society, politics, or life, we all know that trying to stay still is a recipe for stagnation. Since Duarte, Inc., was founded twenty-five years ago as a small design firm in Silicon Valley, the company has undergone numerous transformations. But none has been more challenging than the internal reinvention we began three years ago.
As we worked to motivate our employees and align our organization around a new vision for our collective future, we were simultaneously studying how other leaders—in business and society, at companies large and small and different as Apple and Starbucks, IBM, and Market Basket—have successfully helped others embrace change and sparked movements.
This is our manifesto for change communications and, more specifically, for leaders who want to inspire others to understand and follow their vision for change, over and over again. It's a tricky road to navigate. Most people are more comfortable with what they know than with the unknown future. Great leaders anticipate this challenge, empathize with that struggle, and communicate in ways that overcome resistance. Throughout this process, four tenets play a critical role in helping them to succeed in realizing their goals."
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"Unfortunately, human beings are driven to maintain a favorable self-concept more than they are an accurate one. We have the tendency to see ourselves as exceedingly moral, attractive, smart, funny, athletic etc., and we don't want to disturb that vision. For many of us, ignorance is bliss. But not all of us. ... many of the world's top performers prioritize an accurate self-concept over a favorable one. They strive to treat beliefs that they don't like in the same way they treat beliefs that they do. They want to know when 'all is not well' because, then, they can do something about it. But these high performers are not only receptive to information that might threaten their favored beliefs, they go out of their way to seek it out themselves. In doing so, they kill their darlings."
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"Everyone seems to be talking about diversity these days. Tech companies have pulled back the curtain to reveal how white and male they are. Indian firms are scrambling to appoint female board members in order to abide by new laws. European and North American multinationals are hiring executives from emerging markets. And even Hollywood is admitting that you're more likely to see an alien on screen than an Asian or Latina female.
Diversity has moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have. And innovation is one of the benefits most consistently lauded to sell people on diversity. It sounds promising. Rather than approaching a problem from one perspective, you gain the opportunity to see things more broadly. The problem is, diversity rarely works out that way. [...]
Diversity is undoubtedly one of the best sources of innovation. But it's not automatic. Diversity by itself does not lead to better solutions. Cultural intelligence, or CQ, is the differentiating factor. CQ is a research-based way of measuring and improving effectiveness for working across cultures. And CQ is a multiplying factor when combined with diversity. Diverse teams with low CQ perform significantly worse than homogeneous teams. But diverse teams with high CQ outperform homogeneous teams in every area—productivity, employee engagement, cost savings, profitability, and yes—innovation."
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"Most
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fear that if their name is unconventional, they won't be taken seriously. Listen scaredy cats, you need to let go of that old school way of thinking. Why should you believe me? I run a B2B firm with a playful name, Eat My Words. For more than a decade, our name has been a magnet for attracting clients, employees, and reporters.
A clever business name is your welcome mat. It suggests, 'We're lots of fun and you're going to love working with us!'"
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