All Posts Tagged With: "management"
Hands-On Leadership
“Leadership involves plumbing as well as poetry.”
The quote from Stanford University emeritus professor James G. March appeared in a BusinessWeek article, “The Best Leadership Is Good Management,” by Henry Mintzberg (August 9, 2009; h/t Richard Mallory on the LinkedIn MBNQA Examiners Group). The point of the article, Mintzberg writes, is that “U.S. businesses now have too many leaders who are detached from the messy process of managing. So they don’t know what’s going on.”
The Baldrige model addresses this issue head on. In the first Item of the first Category, the Criteria ask how senior leaders are personally involved in setting, sharing, and living their organizations’ vision and values, promoting legal and ethical behavior, creating a learning environment committed to performance excellence, and engaging in two-way communication with employees.
By embedding core values such as a focus on the future, Baldrige organizations value long-term thinking and ensure that leaders are involved in the actions, as well as the ideas, that will achieve their goals.
Help grow our community: 
Reconsidering Layoffs
In tough economic times, too many companies turn to the quick fix of laying people off. Michael W. Rude, global HR chief at Stryker, a medical technology company in Michigan, says, “From our perspective, any kind of layoff is a sign of mismanagement.” (BusinessWeek, “Is Optimism a Competitive Advantage,” August 13, 2009)
The alternative to laying people off is engaging them in finding solutions that avoid layoffs. In my first book, The Baldrige Quality System (Wiley, 1992), I told a story I heard from Frank Caplan, a Washington consultant:
“When I was a kid we lived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. My grandfather and uncles worked in the steel plants there. During the Depression, Bethlehem Steel got its employees together in large groups and said, “It looks to us like this depression is going to be a long-term proposition. We’re afraid the economy as a whole is in trouble. We want you to help us think very carefully about how to deal with each other and the company in these circumstances.”
17Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued“I remember my grandfather talking about this at the dinner table that night. He said, ‘We decided that those of us who had the most seniority will only work two or three days a week if…
Misguided Management Practices
The Baldrige Criteria ask (1.1a3) how senior leaders “create an environment for organizational performance improvement, the accomplishment of your mission and strategic objectives, innovation, competitive or role-model performance leadership, and organizational agility.”
In addition to the long list of things senior leaders can do to create such an environment, there is an equally impressive list of things they should not do. Aubrey Daniels compiled his own list of no-no’s in Oops! 13 Management Practices That Waste Time and Money (Performance Management Publications, 2009). BusinessWeek summarized them online:
- Employee of the Month. Only one employee can earn it, which means others who may deserve recognition go unnoticed. Instead, recognize all high-performing employees.
- Stretch Goals. They’re typically set so high people get discouraged and the goals are never reached. Instead, set min-goals and celebrate achieving each.
- Performance Appraisals. Deming hated them. Enough said. Instead, evaluate people continuously based on what each individual is expected to achieve.
- Ranking. Competition should be with competitors, not with coworkers. Instead, use external benchmarks to motivate people and, again, evaluate them in relation to individual goals.
- Undeserved Rewards. Rewarding poor performers for such things as perfect attendance sends all kinds of wrong messages. Instead, recognize active behaviors.
- Salary and Hourly Pay. Getting paid for showing up does nothing to…
