November 20, 2020
When leaders commit to building an inclusive organisation, they tend to start with the company mission, vision, values, and a promise to ensure everyone in the organisation has a voice. But if they don’t change the way they communicate every day with their employees, leaders are missing a crucial piece.
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November 13, 2020
Telling a compelling story is how you build credibility for yourself and your ideas. It’s how you inspire an audience and lead an organisation. Whether you need to win over a colleague, a team, an executive, a recruiter, or an entire conference audience, effective storytelling is key...
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November 06, 2020
What is it about virtual presenting that can feel so unnerving? The lack of audience response, the inability to “read the room,” and the lack of direct eye contact all increase our anxiety. Recreating the back and forth of a ...
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October 23, 2020
Chances are you’ve attended a meeting today. Was it time well spent or a soul-draining exercise in futility? Although no two meetings are the same, their collective impact on the culture of a company is significant. Meetings matter. They are the forum where people come together to discuss ideas, make decisions, and be heard. Meetings are where culture forms, grows, and takes hold.
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October 09, 2020
If you’re working to improve your leadership capability, what exactly should you be trying to develop? The experience of the 2020 pandemic offers a powerful lesson: A critical skill a leader must bring to the table is the ability to figure out what kind of thinking is required to address a given challenge.
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September 25, 2020
Most companies recognise that aggressive adoption of digital technologies is increasingly critical to being competitive. Our research shows that the top 10% of early adopters of digital technologies have grown at twice the rate of the bottom 25%, and that they are using cloud systems — not legacy systems — to enable adoption, a trend we expect to accelerate among industry leaders over the coming five years.
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September 18, 2020
Some companies are struggling to keep up with our new normal. Research from Asana reveals nearly half of employees surveyed globally said company-wide goals had been deprioritised since remote working began, with 47 per cent saying those goals have changed at least once during that time – and 60 per cent haven’t increased communication on such issues.
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September 09, 2020
Everyone from the CEO to the newest hire wants to be part of an effective team. But in unprecedented times, with an accelerated shift into the future of work, how can organizations achieve clarity on day-to-day tasks and achieve the company mission?
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September 04, 2020
The term “gig economy” was coined by the former New Yorker editor Tina Brown in 2009. It described how workers in the knowledge economy increasingly were pursuing “a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces while they transacted in a digital marketplace.
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July 31, 2020
Covid-19 has thrust many leaders into remote management which requires a different skill set than face-to-face management. They have been forced to make this transition quickly, and for the most part, without training. While some jobs have proven adaptable, many sectors are not well-suited for the remote environment and many workers have home lives that present overwhelming challenges.
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July 24, 2020
Mark Zuckerberg recently shared his plans for the future of remote work at Facebook. By 2030, he promised, at least half of Facebook’s 50,000 employees would be working from home. “We are going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale,” he declared in a follow-up interview. A few days before...
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July 17, 2020
Has there ever been a time when customers were more demanding of the companies serving them? Industry 4.0 technologies—many barely imaginable only a decade ago—have already enabled genuine breakthroughs in cost, convenience, and customization, creating extraordinary value for buyers while raising the performance bar for producers ever higher.
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June 26, 2020
In 1935, the life expectancy of an S&P 500 company was 90 years. By 2010, it was 14 years and studies show that it’s getting even shorter. No wonder more and more companies, who are tired of change fatigue and endless restructuring, are looking at how they can become a more agile organization and retain their competitive advantage.
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June 12, 2020
Imagine a crisis that forces your company’s employees to change the way they work almost overnight. Despite initial fears that the pressure would be too great, you discover that this new way of working could be a blueprint for the long term.
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May 29, 2020
In an ongoing crisis, clear communication is more important and more difficult than when things seem normal. Employees and customers are hungry for information, so we’re tempted to pull together presentations and communicate with urgency instead of with careful planning. But ...
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May 22, 2020
We’ve been taught that if we want more — money, achievement, vitality, joy, peace of mind — we need to do more, to add more to our ever-growing to-do list. But what if we’ve been taught wrong? What if the answer to getting more of what we want isn’t addition at all, but subtraction?
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May 15, 2020
Remote work, especially in a world affected by Covid-19, naturally leads to “flex time.” Employees with small children might be getting the majority of their work done at night after the kids are in bed. Others are working early and hoping to quit early. Still, others are starting late and working late.
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May 08, 2020
Imagine a crisis that forces your company’s employees to change the way they work almost overnight. Despite initial fears that the pressure would be too great, you discover that this new way of working could be a blueprint for the long term.
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April 24, 2020
As the coronavirus pandemic escalates and disruptions to business-as-usual continue, managers are grappling with the unknown. You don’t know when your employees will be able to return to the office or how different things will be when they do. Regardless...
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March 27, 2020
Those of us who present, facilitate, and teach for a living understand the importance of developing a personal connection with an audience. It’s critical to be and feel natural; to make people laugh, feel at ease, and fully engage — and perhaps even lose themselves — in the content you’re delivering.
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March 20, 2020
In response to the uncertainties presented by Covid-19, many companies and universities have asked their employees to work remotely. While Millions of people report that they work remotely around the world, the new policies leave many employees — and their managers — working out of the office and separated from each other for the first time.
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March 06, 2020
At the end of February, early March 2020, the coronavirus (or Covid-19) took a more serious turn in Korea, Italy, Spain, UK and the U.S. with warnings that it could very well impact how, when, and where we work.
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February 28, 2020
As automation and artificial intelligence dramatically change the nature of work, employees must fine-tune the social and emotional abilities machines cannot master. To encourage this behaviour, employers must adjust the ways they assess, educate, train and reward their workforce on soft skills such as collaboration, communication and critical thinking.
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February 14, 2020
“We need to hold people more accountable.” How many times have you said this in the past year? When things aren’t going well — maybe your numbers are down, you haven’t met your goals, or your pipeline is dry — it’s easy to turn to this familiar mantra. But when you say it...
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January 17, 2020
People face so many pitfalls on their path to making reasonable decisions—whether they’re a consumer making a purchase or an employee meeting performance goals—how do you make it more likely that they’ll land on the most beneficial decision for them and for your organisation?
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January 10, 2020
Our understanding of the unconscious mind has come a long way since Sigmund Freud, grounded in decades of research into what drives ordinary, everyday human behaviour. Today’s behavioural scientists like to say that we are predictably irrational. And what can be predicted can be managed, at least to some degree.
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December 20, 2019
The festive spirit is everywhere during the holiday season. For some, each day feels like waking up to a holiday song — “children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile.” But, for others, it can be the loneliest and most stressful time of the year.
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December 13, 2019
Once upon a time, saying “the soft stuff is the hard stuff” was a snappy challenge to business convention. Now, it’s a cliché. Everyone knows that it’s not easy to suddenly make your colleagues more creative, adaptable, or collaborative, however well-intentioned you may be.
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November 22, 2019
As a leader, you’re going to face conflict. It comes with the territory. But before you try to deal with a conflict, you first need to stop and ask yourself the following question:
Is it hot or cold?
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November 15, 2019
If you’re sometimes frustrated about how little you accomplish during your workday, you’re not alone. Research indicates that only 26% of people often leave the office having accomplished the tasks they set out to do.
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November 08, 2019
Although collaboration is at the heart of modern business processes, most companies are still in the dark about how to manage it. Linear, process-based tools such as activity-based costing, business process reengineering, and total quality management have long been effective at measuring and improving the efficiency of people and organisations in accomplishing individual tasks. But ...
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November 01, 2019
Over the past decade, “purpose” has become a management watchword. Since 2010 it has appeared in the titles of more than 400 new business and leadership books and thousands of articles. And no wonder: Many people—not just Millennials—want to work for organisations whose missions and business philosophies resonate with them intellectually and emotionally.
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October 25, 2019
Good listeners tend to make better decisions, based on better-informed judgments, than ordinary or poor listeners do—and hence tend to be better leaders. By showing respect to our conversation partners, remaining quiet so they can speak, and actively opening ourselves up to facts that undermine our beliefs, we can all better cultivate this valuable skill.
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October 18, 2019
The biggest challenge to moving forward on anything is the transition to working on it. It almost always represents a shift from doing something comfortable to doing something uncomfortable.
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October 04, 2019
Although digital investment is almost unquestionably the right course of action for most firms, organisations still struggle to create the desired results. Estimates of digital transformation failures range from 66% to 84%. Such a high failure rate isn’t surprising, as leaders are trying to create entirely new competencies and wedge them into an organisation with strong legacy cultures and operating models.
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September 27, 2019
In today's dynamic markets, leaders need very different mindsets from those used to manage traditional organisations in less-demanding times. We find that three primary mindset shifts are required to lead agile organisations designed for innovation, collaboration and value creation.
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