When a sale comes in ahead of expectation or when revenue and profit exceed plan, a leader may refer to extra revenue or extra profit which runs the risk of sending the wrong signal to employees. Continue reading “Extra Revenue” vs. “More Revenue” … Read all about it!
Category Archives: People Matters
Posts related to the people side of strategy and operations
Advice and Lessons from Women Leaders Who Drive Change
On April 29, 2014 IntelliVen sponsored the San Francisco Bay Area Organization Development Network (BAODN) panel discussion on the topic of Women Leaders Who Drive Change.
BAODN President Steve McGee facilitated the discussion in front of an audience of over 40 people at Big Heart Pet Brands Headquarters, One Maritime Plaza in San Francisco.
Panelists:
- Christine Hunter; Vice President of Talent at Big Heart Pet Brands, formerly Del Monte.
- Rochelle Kopp; founder of Japan Intercultural Consulting, wrote a book for non-Japanese about working at Japanese company, and teaches cross-cultural business communication.
- Dena McFarland; was part of a significant change at Xerox where they restructured the company yet didn’t lay off anyone. She was also a consultant for hospitals to change their mindset from physician-centered to patient-centered.
- Jeanamaria M. Alayaay; co-facilitated Lean Startup Product Development training for the White House Presidential innovation fellows and Presidential leadership programs, Enterprise Ireland (the Irish government’s tech accelerator), Evernote, and Microsoft Imagine Cup. She works at Luxr.
A rough summary of key points panelists offered in response to opening questions follows:
Advice from women who drive change:
- View everything you experience as “one more piece of an ever-evolving whole”. Continue reading Advice and Lessons from Women Leaders Who Drive Change
How to get on track to success with a team member performing poorly.
If a team member performing poorly relative to expectation, the team’s leader should first make sure basic tenets for success have been established using best contracting and governance practices.
- As the team’s leader, ensure that you:
- Know what the team counts on the team member to do
- Believe s/he has the ability do it.
- Want him/her to do it.
- Validate that s/he:
- Knows what the team is counting on him/her to do
- Believes s/he has the ability do it.
- Wants to do it.
- Verify s/he has what is needed for success; including resources (e.g., time, money, space), knowledge, experience, systems, and access to experienced advisors.
- Ensure there is sufficient incentive to perform up to expectation.
- Provide governance; i.e., every month or so, ask him/her to tell you:
- What s/he is trying to accomplish
- What has been done towards that end
- What has been the result of those efforts
- What has been learned
- What s/he plans to do next.
Continue reading How to get on track to success with a team member performing poorly.
How to decide what kind of leader to be.
As suggested by the illustration in Figure 1, a leader:
- Sets direction represented in the first panel by the target with a bull’s-eye in the middle.
- Aligns resources; that is, the leader collects followers who all look to hit the same target.
- Motivates action, as suggested by the radio bars in the lower corners of the third figure, which causes the resources to progress towards the target.
Another way to say it, as summarized in Figure 2, is that a leader develops, holds, nurtures, communicates, and drives to achieve a vision. Like Harry Potter’s Marauder’s map, the leader holds a map that is always changing, making sense of it, and navigating the course accordingly with the team looking over his/her shoulder. Continue reading How to decide what kind of leader to be.
Leadership development curriculum content for top executives, and those who aspire to become top executives, is now also available on Amazon.
Whether one wants to change personal habits, implement a new information system, improve a business process, get team members to work together, increase a community’s appreciation for diversity, or even to topple a monarchy, taking seven actions driven by seven disarmingly simple truths will individually and collectively help achieve the goal.
Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World is a workbook that top educators, consultants, and executives use to help their students, clients, and staffs become effective leaders of strategic change. Manage to Lead serves as the core content for a class in Organization Leadership, Analysis, Strategy, and Development at one of the top Organization Development masters programs in the United States.
The workbook was introduced in the spring as interactive, digital content and is now also available in softcover from Amazon or as an iBook from iTunes. It introduces a straightforward framework to describe and assess any organization and provides a structured approach to plan and implement next steps for an organization as it strives for long-term growth and performance.
Those searching for high-end leadership development curriculum content should consider placing Manage to Lead at the center of their program. Contact the author to request related teaching artifacts including: Continue reading Leadership development curriculum content for top executives, and those who aspire to become top executives, is now also available on Amazon.