Here is a 10-minute clip from a Harvard Business Press interview with executive coach Gill Corkindale. Corkindale talks about how to identify and deal with alpha personalities. Of particular interest: the unique traits of alpha females (at 2:15), how to manage alpha leaders (at 6:30), and how to lead alpha subordinates (at 8:30). Watch your back!
Goodman and Beenen from Carnegie Mellon University recently developed the concept of an “organizational learning contract.” The key is the first word: organizational. Their learning contract creates shared and specific expectations among students, faculty, and educational administrators concerning learning outcomes, learning environments, and the educational assessment system.
Goodman and Beenen developed the contract specifically for university management schools, and you can guess why: schools are under continued pressure to be relevant and deliver value to their “customers.” But it is intriguing to consider how their model can be applied to a non-academic organization. If you are truly committed to building a learning organization, writing this into a contract with each employee is one powerful way of getting your point across.
There are three basic elements to Goodman and Beenen’s organizational learning contract:
1. Learning outcomes. These are specific, explicitly communicated, and developed with the organization in mind.
2. Learning environments. What types of learning environments will be used to ensure the various outcomes.
3. Learning systems. How the contract will be implemented, outcomes measured, and curriculum redesigned.
The authors say organization-level learning contracts build in accountability, are a force for integration, and can be used as diagnostic tools to identify learning gaps or mismatched expectations. This is quite a radical concept for business schools but is no less valuable for non-academic organizations.
Organization Learning Contracts and Management Education; Paul Goodman and Gerard Beenen; Academy of Management Learning & Education (2008, vol. 7, no. 4, 521-534)
Colleague Andrew Graham alerted me to a forward-looking report produced by the Washington-based IBM Center for The Business of Government. “Ten Challenges Facing Public Managers” is a call to action for public sector leaders, particularly in the U.S. Read ‘em and weep:
Fiscal Sanity: “America’s current social insurance programs are both costly and antiquated. It is time to take a fresh look at reforming these programs to reflect current economic and budgetary considerations.”
Crisis of Competence: “The issue isn’t always ‘who does the work’ but rather ‘do we have the right talent at the right time doing the right job with the right level of accountability?’”
Information Overload: “The threats of information overload, and the possibility of missing important information needed to make informed decisions, has increased. However, breakthroughs in data capture, data standards, and data storage have created opportunities for large-scale analysis.”
Governing Without Boundaries: “Government is increasingly turning to non-hierarchical ways of doing business, often called ‘collaborative networks’ and ‘boundary-less organizations.’ However, these new models raise questions about
how to govern effectively in a network-based environment.”
E-Government Is Only the Beginning: “Public managers will need to embrace the long hard slog to standardize and integrate their operations. They will need to reframe service delivery around the customer.”
Government by Contractors?: “The government needs to take a strategic look at contracting, decide how to manage it, the appropriate roles for all parties, and the right contracting methods. Most important, it needs to invest the necessary resources to make working for the government more attractive.”
Results Really Do Matter: “Federal departments and agencies are confronted with long-standing and substantial challenges to becoming more results-oriented. Solving these problem areas will require a performance-driven system that builds on crosscutting connections between agencies, levels of government, and the nonprofit and private sectors.”
“Green” Leadership: “Solving our environmental problems requires a blend of public policies and incentives that encourage technology and management innovations across the globe.”
Security and Privacy in a Flat World: “Security and privacy issues need to be explicitly factored into any technology decision. . . In some cases, the most efficient solution must yield to the more secure solution.”
Expect Surprises: “Policymakers will need forward-looking information to set the stage for early warnings about emerging threats and to make informed choices about effective government responses.”
photo credit: naoki.sato
For all the attention paid to domestic violence, there is little focus on how it may play out in the workplace. In fact, researchers from University of Arkansas say, it is a “dirty little secret” that domestic violence casts a shadow on workplace performance.
In a thorough overview of domestic abuse and the workplace, the authors illustrate the scale of the problem, offer a case study of one organization’s response, and present current best practices.
Just how big a workplace problem is Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)? Studies in 2006 and 2007 involving 2,400 workers at three large American organizations showed that 10 percent of female and male employees experienced physical abuse, stalking, or threats of physical harm within the previous 12 months. Of these employees, 19 percent said some form of abuse occurred while they were at work, most likely stalking or threats by their partners.
What effect this has on their workplace performance is not clear, the authors state. Research to date seems to indicate that IPV affects the employee’s ability to be mentally engaged at work but not necessarily the employee’s ability to be physically present at work. IPV victims find a way to get to their jobs because they see employment as an economic lifeline. In the U.S. health care context, the average cost of IPV victimization ranges from $294 to $948.
The paper offers a case study of Liz Claiborne, Inc., where IPV started as an externally focused marketing campaign that grew into internal educational seminars and policies and protocols. From their experience and the experience of other organizations, the authors offer the following best practices:
Coming Into the Light: Intimate Partner Violence and Its Effects at Work; O’Leary-Kelly, Lean, Reeves, Randel; Academy of Management Perspectives (vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 57-71).
photo credit: taberandrew