Why are some boards great at hiring company leaders, while others get it wrong? Make the right choice by following these four key principles.
Some boards still pick chief executives who aren’t right for the job – repeatedly. Make the right decision by following the example of successful boards.
Are you and your employees stuck in a vicious circle of firefighting?
Workers’ compensation business illustrates the cycle of rework – and more rework – that comes from not doing jobs right first time. Despite knowing that legal processes and costs could be slashed by contacting workers within 24 hours of injury, staff were too busy to do so.
It’s likely that you spend a fair proportion of your time problem-solving. What’s the secret to overcoming hurdles swiftly so you can get on with the important stuff?
Whether you are a homegrown startup or a multi-million multinational, obstacles will always be thrown in your path. As you try to concentrate on productivity and innovation, fresh difficulties are always around the corner.
Business can be a minefield, which is why employing a military mindset can be one of the most effective ways to direct your teams.
Strategies from the battlefield don’t sound like the natural choice for top-level business leaders, but successful companies actually share more common ground than you think with the US Marines Corps.
How well does your employer understand your role and the value you bring to your organisation? And do you fully understand it yourself?
Beneath your job description lies a “hidden curriculum of work”, or a “job-within-the-job”. Its unwritten challenges include continuous change management and workplace politics, for example.
The noise of modern life can distract marketing teams from creating their best work.
Whether you head up the marketing department for a lean, energetic startup or a powerful blue chip corporation, it is important that your team is consistently creative. There are a number of steps you can take to ensure your team is able to do its best creative work in an “always on” environment.
When a product fails, should you improve it or kill it? Senior managers are best placed to make the right choice – quickly.
Your engineers and managers work for months, often years, to develop and launch new products. They invest significant resources in research, marketing and distribution. So to see those products go down in flames creates a difficult choice: do you try to improve the quality and support for products – or terminate them?
There are many guides to the three, five or seven steps to an ideal culture. But only one golden rule: don’t mess it up.
As a leader, you must watch everything you say and do – because everyone else will, and they’ll put a lot of weight on it. That means it’s easy to mess up a workplace culture – even with the best of intentions.
Employee engagement is a problem. To fix it, let your workers rebel, break the rules and be themselves.
Throughout our working lives we’re taught to conform. The pressure only grows as we climb the career ladder. Workers and their organisations both pay a price for this: decreased engagement, productivity and innovation.
As the business world changes with increasing pace, leaders need to develop a new set of core skills if they are to keep up, write…
The success of your organisation depends on good decision making, a key requirement of good leadership.
The human brain has evolved to make most decisions automatically. Behavioural and neuroscience shows that our brains struggle with information overload, especially when multitasking, leaving them susceptible to subjectivity, bias and errors.
If landing a seat on a board is one of your goals, you need to do some serious preparation to make it happen. Writing for Forbes, Stuart R. Levine sets out six actions to increase your chances of success.
“It’s critical that you take smart steps to develop your resources and skills into assets that will showcase your credentials and position you for success,” Levine advises.
Digital technology has put a wealth of human data at our fingertips. How can we be sure we are using it responsibly and ethically?
There’s no doubt that facts and statistics offer valuable insights that can be employed to boost business. But it’s vital to lay down ground rules as a company before using personal information to our advantage, says Paul Daugherty, writing for MIT Sloan.
Five key leadership behaviours lay behind rare ‘breakthrough’ success in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) business.
‘Breakthroughs’ are products that expand or create new product categories – often required to maintain or grow a company’s market share. In the CPG market, 80% of growth comes from 1% of brands. Breakthrough success is so rare that of 3,500 new brands only 18 made the grade.
Shift your mindset from your business to your staff to create competitive advantage.
You need strong leadership teams to develop your business. Yet leadership is more difficult than ever because of a shift in focus from the business to individual employees. Writing for Entrepreneur, Glen Llopis says business model evolution is influenced by two factors.
Does your team trust you? Maybe not as much as you think. Here’s how to win them over.
Research shows that less than half of workers place a “great deal of trust” in their employer. And while 80% of employees trust their colleagues, only 65% trust senior leaders in their companies. Low levels of trust means employees will look for other jobs and be less engaged and productive.
Giving feedback should be constructive and helpful, but that might not be how everybody views it
The key requirements of giving good feedback are good intentions, sound preparation and a calm response. The feedback process takes a lot of time, and can be a cause of anxiety for both manager and employee, particularly when you are dealing with somebody who might cry, yell or get defensive.
Trust takes years to build, yet can be destroyed in an instant. But retaining and regaining the confidence of your employees can be achieved if you modify your actions
Trust is a precious resource. Once broken it can be difficult for businesses and bosses to regain, damaging chances of future success.
Training alone often fails to develop today’s employees into tomorrow’s senior managers. It is systems and behaviours in the workplace that need to change before workers can take an organisation to the next level.
Several mistakes are routinely made when leadership training is offered in a bid to transform good organisations into great ones.
Not all of us are natural leaders, but mastering some fundamental skills can boost your confidence and performance.
If you struggle with leadership, you might be inclined to focus on your deficiencies. Learning and implementing some key techniques of success will be a more fruitful response, according to business psychologist Dionne Mahaffey writing for Forbes.
Help your managers make the most of their capabilities, and both they and your company will reap the benefits.
Natural born leaders are the lottery winners of the business management world. The rest of us need a little help, says CEO and leadership coach John Hawkins, writing for Forbes. That help can come in the form of purposeful leadership management development.
A good executive coach challenges your belief systems, helping you see what you’re doing wrong so you can get it right.
We all have our blind spots – preconceptions about ourselves as people and as leaders. If these are allowed to go unchallenged, our own lack of self-awareness acts as a block to our ongoing development.
Find out what good coaching is and why we all need it.
Even the most logical proposals for change can be met with suspicion unless executives deliver them with integrity.
But how do you consistently get your message across to your teams in a positive and believable way?
By taking three key steps, leaders can allow their sincerity to shine and have a greater chance of success. Here’s what a “credibility first” transformation model looks like.
When Ralph Lauren installed a discount retail specialist at the head of his luxury brand, he was seeking to secure his firm’s future in a rapidly evolving market.
Hiring your next CEO from outside the company used to be a last resort. But that’s changing as more boards look beyond their own ranks for their next chief executives. Here’s how you can best go about it
How do you react to an angry customer, a difficult colleague or a tense negotiation? Great communicators face all kinds of conflict and know exactly what to say and how to say it.
Communicate well and others will trust in your ability to lead and support them.
Think on your feet and people will see you as credible, professional, reliable and confident.
You can’t avoid scandal, but you can prepare for it. Here’s how to plan for five of the most serious reputational risks to your business.
Design thinking can improve your health, wellbeing and, ultimately, your executive performance.
What can you do if the team you take over created the problem you’ve been hired to fix?
The best-known team-building framework is “forming, storming, norming and performing”. But that assumes you’re building a team from scratch.
In a recent article for Harvard Business Review, Michael Watkins offers a new model: “assessing, reshaping and accelerating”.
Companies certainly recognise the importance of management and leadership coaching, spending a global total of $24bn on it in 2013 alone. But in a tough economic climate, it’s often the training budget that’s first to feel the squeeze.
Writing for Harvard Business Review, Ron Ashkenas of Schaffer Consulting and the University of Houston’s Robert Hausmann propose a new approach to leadership training – one centered on real-world business problems.
If you struggle to secure buy-in for your proposals, then it might be time to change your strategy. There are a number of “issue-selling” tactics…
As the pace of business gets ever faster, leaders must learn to combine speed with effectiveness, say Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, writing for Harvard…
Become a great boss by thinking about the kind of boss you would hate to be, advises Avery Augustine, writing for Inc.com, via The Muse.…
Leadership is not all about you, write Sucheta Nadkarni and Andreas Richter on the University of Cambridge Judge Business School blog. A strong team makes…
Under pressure you don’t rise to the occasion – you sink to the level of your training. That’s just one of the lessons business coaches…
Becoming the authority in your field is a great way to grow your business, says Brian Horn, writing for Entrepreneur.com. The author outlines seven easy…
No strategy is ever perfect, says Ken Favaro, writing for Strategy+Business. But it takes great leadership and confidence to recognise this. The author poses two…
All leaders make poor decisions from time to time. Usually, they are relatively small and insignificant. However, writing for CEO.com, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman…
The most successful people in business rely on others to do their jobs better, insists Camille Preston, writing for the Fortune website. Far from being…
Professionals who collaborate with their colleagues on cross-disciplinary work generate more revenue, inspire greater client loyalty and give their firms competitive edge, says Heidi Gardner…
We know a great deal about what strategy is, but very little about how to make strategy work, write Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles…
Are we in the midst of an employee engagement crisis? Or have consultants created a problem in order to sell business a solution, asks Nick…
For some entrepreneurs, things seem to fall into place on their rise to financial success, observes Jayson Demers, writing for Entrepreneur.com. However, in spite of…
Wish there were more hours in a day? Jayson De Mers, writing for Inc.com, reveals fifteen easy ways to boost productivity right now. 1) Go…
Competitive advantage is shifting, say Thomas N. Hubbard, Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi, writing for Strategy+Business. The new industry leaders are leaner and more focused…
The perfect board is diverse, well-trained and highly skilled, says Dr Roger Barker of the Institute of Directors. Writing in Management Today, Barker describes how…
For your company to thrive, you need each and every one of your employees to give their all. So how can you excite your workforce,…
You are failing in your role as a leader if just one of your employees feels undervalued, says Glenn Llopis, writing for Forbes.com. Today’s employees…
The wrong words at the wrong time can bring a brainstorming session to a “screeching halt”, says Sam Harrison, writing for Fast Company. If you…
