This week I spoke in Toronto as part of Rotman School of Management’s Leadership Experts Series and Jason Pankau and I spoke at Northwestern University’s Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement in Chicago. The presentations addressed leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation. Above is free download of our slides from the Northwestern presentation.
Yesterday, I joined author-consultant Kevin Eikenberry on a teleseminar to discuss accountability and employee engagement. As soon as I receive the link that will allow you to access the recording of the FREE teleseminar, I will post it here.
During the call, I cited two research studies. Here are links below to information on each of them:
Local culture more important than global culture (See the parts of the article entitled “It All Depends on Which Store You’re In” and “The Encounter Must Be Measured Locally.”)
Last week I was invited to attend the World Business Forum in NYC with 50 other leading bloggers. The presentation that resonated the most with me was Gary Hamel’s. In it, he outlined three challenges facing today’s organizations:
These ideas are from Hamel’s book, The Future of Management. In upcoming blog posts, I’ll comment on the challenges Hamel identified. Do you think he identified the top challenges? If so, why? If not, what did he miss?
Next Tuesday I’ll be speaking about connection cultures, leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Before my presentation I’m meeting with Roger Martin, Rotman’s dean who also happens to be the author of an excellent book I read entitled The Opposable Mind and an upcoming release I look forward to reading entitled The Design of Business. Rotman is bringing fresh thinking to business and I’m eager to share my work with members of the Rotman community as well as learn more about new ideas emerging from this center of innovative thinking. If you have not already, I encourage you to check out the award-winning Rotman magazine.
Today and tomorrow I’m in NYC as one of the bloggers invited by HSM to cover its World Business Forum.
What has struck me about the emerging theme here this morning is that more individuals in the business community are recognizing the importance of factors beyond the obvious tasks of business. A model we use in our book Fired Up or Burned Out is Task Excellence + Relationship Excellence = Sustainable Superior Performance. At this conference, I hear a steady drumbeat of speakers who say that our organizations desperately need to develop Relationship Excellence. By Relationship Excellence I mean the relationship employees have with their organization’s identity, the relationship employees have with each other and the relationship employees have with their day-to-day jobs. Consider, for example, the following quotes:
Motivating employees to align their behavior with the organization’s strategy (strategic alignment) and give their best efforts (employee engagement) is one of the challenges of senior leadership. Typically, leaders and stars feel connected to the organization but research shows that 75 percent or more of the employees do not. Because they don’t feel connected, over time they gradually stop caring, they stop aligning their behavior with organizational goals, they stop giving their best efforts and they stop fully communicating. One serious consequence of the break-down in communications is that decision makers don’t get the information they need to make optimal decisions. These conditions lead to underperformance at both individual and corporate levels.
The Forum for Performance Management and Measurement, part of the Department of Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, recently released a research report that shows a positive link between the level of employee satisfaction among health care workers and the level of patient satisfaction. You can download the report here.
On October 14, I’ll be giving the keynote address on leadership, employee engagement, productivity and innovation at the Forum for Performance Management and Measurement’s annual Think Tank held at the Union League Club of Chicago.
Change in organizations can be brought about by legitimate or illegitimate means, with understandably different results. Take a look at this Fast Company article on the methods of consultant Fernando Flores for an example of change by illegitimate means. Typically, coercion, degradation and intimidation are the methods of choice by people I refer to as “Intentional Disconnectors,” individuals who tear others apart for the sake of an unhealthy need for ego gratification. Bob Sutton describes them well in his book The No Asshole Rule.
Last week when I toured Google’s corporate headquarters, the “Googleplex,” I was shown a monitor that had an image of the planet earth with multicolored beams of light shooting up from the various contintents. The beams represented Google searches that were presently being conducted from those locations. (For example, when I searched on Google this morning for an article on “augmented intelligence,” it would have appeared on Google’s global search monitor as a beam of light shooting up from Greenwich, Connecticut where I live.)
What stood out to me when I observed Google’s global search monitor was that locations such as North America, East Asia and Western Europe were aflame with Google beams of search activity whereas some regions like Africa and much of South America were largely dark.
If Google searches can be thought of as a proxy for curiosity and learning, then locations (nations and organizations) that are aflame with search activity are preferable to locations that are dark.
