All Posts Tagged With: "leadership development"
Harvard Business Review’s Most Influential Management Ideas of the Decade
Everybody has a Top 10 list and HBR is no different. Well, they’re a little different: Their editors came up with the Top 12 most influential management ideas since 2000 (“The Decade in Management Ideas,” Julia Kirby, January 1, 2010):
1. Shareholder Value as a Strategy. And not a good one. Even the guy who popularized it concurs. “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy,” said Jack Welch. “Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products.”
2. IT as a Utility. Cloud computing is the latest step toward buying computing capabilities as services.
3. The Customer Chorus. Technical and social developments have given customers a stronger and more pervasive voice—and companies are finding ways to listen.
4. Enterprise Risk Management. Chief risk officers hold the new umbrella over pockets of risk that had been scattered, and addressed separately, throughout the organization.
5. The Creative Organization. The ability to produce creative output was seen as a competitive advantage to encourage through collaboration and diverse perspectives.
6. Open Source. Wikipedia, which represents the power of open source, was born in 2001.
7. Going Private. According to the article, “As the decade wore on, private equity’s playbook for turning around businesses was increasingly held up as best-practice management,” especially in the areas of strategic focus and governance.
8. Behavioral Economics. Rational thought alone does not explain human decision-making. Yup, that’s the 2000’s in a nutshell.
9. High Potentials. Some managers are more equal than others and you would be smart to develop them.
10. Competing on Analytics. The data you collect…
4Jan2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | Continued25 “Moonshots for Management”
Last year the Management Lab, with support from McKinsey & Company, assembled 35 management experts to discuss what management practices imperiled the long-term success of large organizations and what fundamental changes are needed in management principles, processes, and practices.
Gary Hamel, author of two leading books on business strategy, described three broadly-shared beliefs among the participants in the Harvard Business Review:
- “Management” is one of our most important social technologies.
- The management model of the last 100 years is out of date.
- We must reinvent management to make large organizations more adaptable, innovative, and inspiring places to work.
The Baldrige model can help any organization of any size reinvent its management system by identifying, prioritizing, and acting on the major gaps in that system. I believe Baldrige provides a systems perspective and sound guidance on achieving the 25 “moonshots for management” that the experts proposed:
- Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. The first question in the Baldrige Criteria is: “How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values?” The Criteria then ask how senior leaders deploy them and how their personal actions support them.
- Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. Criteria Item 1.2 asks how the organization fulfills its societal responsibilities and supports its key communities.
- Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. The Baldrige model values efficiency and profitability, but it also values quality products and services, satisfied customers and employees, ethical behavior, and stakeholder trust.
- Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. The Baldrige Criteria ask how “senior leaders communicate with and engage the entire workforce” and how…
Leadership: Seeking Unconscious Competence
The Baldrige Criteria (5.1b2) ask how you address the learning and development needs of your leaders, including needs that are both self-identified and identified by their superiors. I’d like to focus on the identification of those needs and suggest a role for the Conscious Competence Ladder.
The ladder is particularly helpful with coaching leaders on what they need to learn. Somebody has probably developed a behavior/skill checklist for slotting leaders into one of the ladder’s four rungs:
Level 1: Unconscious Incompetence. The leader is clueless about the subject, lacking almost any knowledge or skills. Worse yet, the leader is not aware of this weakness and, as a result, exudes confidence where none is warranted. We’ve all had leaders like this, especially if we live in the United States.
Level 2: Conscious Incompetence. The leader realizes his/her ability is limited and that others are much more competent in this area. The leader’s confidence plummets until learning takes place.
Level 3: Conscious Competence. The leader puts his/her learning into practice and gains confidence during the process.
Level 4: Unconscious Competence. Repeatedly applying the new knowledge and skills create new habits that allow the leader to perform confidently and without conscious effort.
All of us, including leaders, need someone to help us figure out where we are on this ladder for any given behavior or skill. A performance management system should do that for all employees. It should also provide the learning opportunities, development plans, incentives, and progress reviews that will help leaders and other employees improve and grow.
10Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
