Think organizational culture is limited to the formality of dress and the length of coffee breaks? Think again. Culture shapes innumerable aspects of workplace functioning, everything from how information is shared and news is spread to how mistakes are handled and questions are received. But almost no facet of organizational performance is more impacted by culture than interpersonal interactions. The …
How many times have you been in the car, wrapped in thoughts of the day, and found yourself driving somewhere other than where you intended? Defaulting to familiar routines in the absence of conscious thought has uses in life, not the least enabling us to navigate a highly multitasking world. But “auto piloting” in the human sphere ensures that our …
Reflective leaders are distinguished by patterns of regular self-assessment and analysis. Reflective organizations employ similar mechanisms of collective reflection and shared stock-taking. But how are such structures established in the workplace? At the heart of any robust system of organization-wide assessment is the collection of data related to workplace culture and perceptions. Drawing from both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, metrics …
What exactly is a job? A person could work a lifetime without ever explicitly considering such a question. But its importance should not be underestimated, for actions are guided and shaped (as well as constrained and limited) by below-the-line understandings of what one is actually doing day after day. In the most basic formulation, a job could be described simply …
The data were clear. Three supervisors were doing a great job. Three others were struggling or failing outright. The CEO instinctively approached the survey results as a tool to pinpoint deficient managers. But our experience suggested that the problem lay less in any one individual’s failures than in the overall variation of leadership within the organization. For such a wide …
We once worked with a manufacturing company that was trying to move from a top-down leadership approach to a more participation-focused system. Brian, a manager of one of the larger plants, readily accepted the challenge building a new concept of leadership and was doing an excellent job of making unfamiliar and sometimes difficult choices. One day we commend him on …
Vision and the conscious building of culture are central to the individual dimensions of reflective leadership. But both take on additional significance in the context of building and leading a reflective organization. Vision lies at the heart of the unity of purpose needed to sustain long-term collective excellence. A clear articulation of why an organization exists and what contribution it …
To the extent that leaders consider workplace unity at all, they tend to think in terms of fixing what’s broken. Discord is overlooked in countless forms and action is taken only when conditions get truly out of hand, when people are shouting in hallways or departments are refusing to work with one another. But just as peace at its fullest …
Why do leaders accept the largely avoidable costs of disagreement, turf issues, silos, politics, competition, cliques, hostility, and other forms of organizational disunity? Below-the-line beliefs about human nature play a role. But equally influential are related beliefs about the role of contest and competition in society. Competition is almost universally seen (in Western societies, at least) as a powerful source …
Organizations succeed or fail as whole systems. They can no more thrive on the strength of most-favored aspects than a car can use a functioning drive shaft and carburetor to make up for a dead alternator and flat tires. Systems whose elements are mismatched, sub-optimized, disconnected, or otherwise disunited will, therefore, inevitably fail to reach their maximum potential. This is …