Articles for Leaders & Change Practitioners
leadership
Conflict
Resolution
Organization
Development
A Question of Loyalty
I was consulting with a significant part of a large aerospace company. I was interviewing a very senior vice president. He was complaining about how hard it had become holding on to top employees. Of particular concern to him was what he saw as the lack of loyalty of...
You Can’t Do It Alone and. . .
You Don't Have to Many leaders have the notion that it is lonely at the top. Like so many things, if you believe it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fact is no one has ever accomplished anything of any significance alone. Think about that. I think about my...
Get to Critical Mass Support with System Mapping
Creating change in human systems such as teams and organizations is a matter of developing a critical mass of support for the change goal. Of course, developing that critical mass may involve working through whatever resistances there are and resolving the conflicts...
Changing an Organization’s Culture
Changing an organization's culture or the norms of a team is not something to take lightly. An organization's culture is the pattern of how it routinely behaves much like the personality of a human being. The analogy is apt since an organization is a human system....
Don’t Waste Your Strategic Plan
Don't waste your strategic plan. A good strategic plan serves as the focal point for how an organization toward both long and short-range success. It provides… Direction for aligning an organization's staff and activitiesCriteria for organizational decision-making....
The Ways We Waste Our Time and Energy: Conscious Use of Self #2
Time is a resource. And leaders never have enough of it. There are staffs to be managed, customers to coddled, finances to figured out, superiors to satisfy, and the partner and kids at home to be pleased and loved. The list goes on and on. Time’s a wastin'. Yet, we...
Self-Mastery: The Foundation of Effective Leadership (and a lot else!)
The foundation of effective leadership is self-mastery. When followers aren't following and results are hard to come by, the first place a leader needs to look is at themselves. When life isn’t working for you, when you aren’t getting the results you want, when your...
Leadership = Some Place to Go and People Willing to Follow
Great leaders are going someplace extraordinary and lots of people follow them! Leaders in most organizations know where they want to go. Keeping followers aligned and in sync to get there, however, can be frustrating. Here are seven areas to turn that frustration into excitement. All of the questions are born from the two primary aspects of leadership: They have some place to go, and they have people following them!
Quick and Easy Consensus Decision-Making
Consensus decision-making has the reputation of being very time-consuming. It needn’t be if the steps outlined below are followed. The failure of most supposed consensus procedures result from failing to ask those objecting if they are willing to accede to the...
Six Ways to Cure the Dysfunctional Team Blues
The CEO is frustrated! She is the CEO of a major health care organization and, like many other organization leaders, believes in teams. She has project teams, functional teams, cross-functional teams, process improvement teams, etc. A few of those teams work very well...
Resolving Conflict in Teams & Organizations
A few months ago, I was working with five faculty members of a university sociology department. They were having difficulty getting along with each other. There were lots of conflicts and negative judgments were abundant. I interviewed each one....
Conflict and the Misuse of Differences
How we misuse the differences that we might learn from.
Managing Team Conflict
Cynthia Phillips, Ph.D., Guest Author Purpose of this Paper Describe the nature of conflict in teamsDefine types of conflict and describe how each manifests in a teamIdentify reasons why team members struggle with conflictDescribe how a team leader...
Anatomy of a Diversity Initiative
Meaningful interest in diversity, inclusion, and equity have waxed and waned in the United States since the 1940s and probably much earlier. World War II saw women taking an active role in the workplace for the first time. In 1948, President Truman of...
Creating Safe Teams
An important key to having great teams and organizations is their sense of safety. Their members do not fear censure should their all-too-human egos and emotions become evident. They feel free to speak, to dissent, to be radical, and even outlandish. This freedom is...
You Can’t Do It Alone and. . .
You Don't Have to Many leaders have the notion that it is lonely at the top. Like so many things, if you believe it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fact is no one has ever accomplished anything of any significance alone. Think about that. I think about my...
Get to Critical Mass Support with System Mapping
Creating change in human systems such as teams and organizations is a matter of developing a critical mass of support for the change goal. Of course, developing that critical mass may involve working through whatever resistances there are and resolving the conflicts...
Resolving Conflict in Teams & Organizations
A few months ago, I was working with five faculty members of a university sociology department. They were having difficulty getting along with each other. There were lots of conflicts and negative judgments were abundant. I interviewed each one. They were all...
Changing an Organization’s Culture
Changing an organization's culture or the norms of a team is not something to take lightly. An organization's culture is the pattern of how it routinely behaves much like the personality of a human being. The analogy is apt since an organization is a human system....
The Secret Sauce for Making Teams Work
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” -- Margaret Mead She was pissed! She couldn't make her team work. As the new leader of a perennial best-company-to-work-for, she was...
Don’t Waste Your Strategic Plan
Don't waste your strategic plan. A good strategic plan serves as the focal point for how an organization toward both long and short-range success. It provides… Direction for aligning an organization's staff and activitiesCriteria for organizational decision-making....
Definition of Organization Development
Let’s clarify the definition of organization development (OD), the most powerful technology for managing change in human systems. It is unclear to too many people and organizations who could need it. Not too long ago, I was having dinner with a client during a project...
Quick and Easy Consensus Decision-Making
Consensus decision-making has the reputation of being very time-consuming. It needn’t be if the steps outlined below are followed. The failure of most supposed consensus procedures result from failing to ask those objecting if they are willing to accede to the...