LEADING THOUGHTS

I’m a big fan of management thinker Meg Wheatley. Actually, to describe Wheatley as a management thinker doesn’t quite do her justice. Since the early 1990s, she has been researching and writing about organizational learning, change management, and spiritually grounded leadership. But she’s also devoted a considerable amount of energy to building heathy communities both in organizations and in impoverished locales.

Of late, Wheatley has been writing about how to persevere in the face of adversity and how to shift thinking in the midst of difficult circumstances, both timely skills.

So I was eager to read the recent conversation between Wheatley and the sharp-thinking Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of strategy+business. They don’t disappoint.

Wheatley says that it is a difficult time for leaders to be innovative, and that there is little time in modern organizations for reflection and learning what works and doesn’t work.

“For me, community — people working together and knowing that others are there to support them — is a critically important but largely invisible resource. . . But community is hard to find in most organizations. Not only do many leaders deny that this capacity is important, but they’re actually destroying it through their current management approaches.”

Such as? Whteatley says she many forward-thinking business leaders are being driven by their boards and bosses to implement continuous cutbacks and produce more results with fewer resources.

“Too many leaders fail to realize that the old ways, their mental maps, aren’t giving them the information they need. But instead of acknowledging that, they push on more frantically, desperate to have the old ways work. When human beings work from fear and panic, we lose nearly all of our best reasoning capacities. We can’t see patterns, think about the future, or make moral judgments.”

When you’re lost, Wheatley says, the solution is to admit it and call together everyone who might have information that’s needed to construct a new map, people from all levels of the organization.

Kleiner pushes Wheatley to explain her view that the only leaders who succeed are those who practise a spiritual discipline. Wheatly doesn’t back down, though she makes clear that, by “spiritual discipline,” she doesn’t mean a religious practice per se but rather “some regular activity that leads you to reflect on your struggles and challenges in a larger context.” That might be meditation, time in a natural space, or even Alcoholics Anonymous. Her point is that leaders must engage in some practice that pushes them out of the perception that they are the centre of the universe.

You can find the original article here (registration may be required)

I recently profiled Queen’s Universty School of Business accounting professor Pamela Murphy and her work on the psychology of fraud. Prof. Murphy is doing excellent work in helping us understand how people rationalize unethical or fraudulent behaviour. “Everyone does it” and “no one gets hurt” are popular rationalizations that people use to avoid guilt or self-condemnation while committing fraud.

Read the article in QSB Magazine

In search of the entrepreneur’s risk-taking mentality, a professor of corporate strategy undertakes intensive field test. . . at the casino. His lesson: lousy at Baccarat, lousy in the boardroom. Read the article

Organizations are hollowing out their middle manager ranks. Pity: these folks have a greater impact on company performance than almost any other part of the organization. Their influence stems from their role in project management: allocating resources, imposing deadlines. Not sexy stuff but critical for effective operations. Read the article

Between LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networking sites, it’s easier than ever to reconnect with colleagues and friends from your distant past. Maybe you’d rather keep those connections in the past. But there’s a good case to be made that dormant ties can be even more valuable than current ties. “Insights from dormant ties tend to be more novel, and more efficient to get, than those from current ties.” Read the article

They are too infrequently performed, though they can help employees immensely. When they are done, they can be biased or focus on the wrong metrics. Can performance reviews be redeemed? Turns out, feedback loops and other innovations are giving performance reviews new life. Read the article

When it comes to being effective negotiators, women have it tough. Either they’re reluctant to push their interests or, if they do, are tagged with being pushy for asking too much. What to do? One, the female negotiator should get smart by learning what others in the organization are doing to advance themselves. Two, she should practise negotiating with shopkeepers or family memebrs. Third, she should “pay more attention to the style and impression that she is creating so she makes sure she doesn’t come off as being too aggressive.” Easier said than done. Read the article

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A new box is being pencilled into org charts: chief operating officer for HR. The motivation: to coax more performance improvements from the talent pool. Business leaders may not be getting the HR services they want, but shouldn’t the existing HR leadership be able to solve this problem? The debate continues. Read the article

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By rights, solid knowledge management techniques should help work teams avoid reinventing the wheel. In fact, new reseach shows that when project teams have access to stored organizational knowledge, they complete tasks more quickly, but the quality of their work doesn’t necessarily improve. Teams that are most likely to show increases in both efficiency and quality are those dealing with constantly changing projects. Read the article

Today, we come not to bury the Net Generation employee but to explore what employers need to do to avoid coming across as boorish dead-heads. In this short clip from McKinsey & Company, Clay Shirky, author and professor of new media at New York University, discusses the challenges Millenials face in many workplaces (you don’t mind cranking out some PowerPoint slides this weekend, do you?) and what employers need to do to retain these up and comers. Remember, Shirkey says, “Behaviour is motivation filtered through opportunity.”

Losing employees, even solid performers, can end up strengthening your organization in the long run, at least in the topsy turvy world of the fashion industry. The trick is to keep up the connections to your long departed employees and their gold-plated networks.

Read the article

It’s easy to blame corporate culture for all manner of ills. But if you’re seeking change in your organization, you’ll need to use the existing culture to change the behaviors that matter most. Over time, the culture you have will evolve into the culture you need.

Read the article

Joint union-management training is unusual in North America, and it’s not hard to figure out why. On the continuum of union-management relations—from confrontation through armed truce, working harmony, and cooperation—a great many relationships sit on the cantankerous side. And for the few joint training programs that sprout as promising shoots, many are soon cut down because union members perceive that their leadership is too cozy with management and not looking after worker interests.

On the other hand, the benefits of jointly training managers and shop stewards are tantalizing. The promise lies in increasing boundary-spanning knowledge, reducing the friction that can lead to high grievance costs or work stoppages, and finding shared ways of meeting change head on.

Read the article I wrote for Queen’s University IRC on joint union-management training at ENMAX Power Corporation.