Explainers Archives - Page 7 of 11

The Difference Between Autonomy and Independence

Individuals and teams crave the ability to execute their work without interference or complication. So instead of isolating, what should a division do when they feel their competence, relatedness, and/or their autonomy threatened?

Explainers

What Leaders Can Learn from Artificial Birds

With just three simple rules, a group of relatively disconnected individuals can form dynamic and useful group behavior.

Explainers

Introducing Yourself as a New Leader

The interviews are done, the offer letter signed—you can’t wait to start your first day as the new leader of a team. But before you charge in with your undoubtedly brilliant plan, have you reflected on how to best introduce yourself to the team?

Explainers

The Truth of Working Longer Hours

As the rate of disruption speeds up, founders are tasked with matching it. We’re all putting in more and more hours in a daily attempt to stem the tide. The question is, is all that hard work paying off?

Explainers

Why Your CMO Needs to Get Involved in Company Culture

If one of your customers came to work at your company for a day, would they be excited to see how the brand lives out its values? Or would they be shocked to see a team completely at odds with what the brand represents?

Explainers

Avoid These Commons Risks during M&As to Prevent Culture Clashes

Mergers and acquisitions often seem like good ideas on paper. But when it comes to integrating two (or more!) cultures, people have a way of not conforming to formulas.

Explainers

Why Team Engagement Declines before it Gets Better

When we work with a client, we regularly survey the team to determine their readiness for change. And we’ve noticed that a funny thing usually happens within the first few months of our engagement: the team’s overall sense of belonging goes down.

Explainers

What Is Organizational Design?

It’s the next frontier of design thinking—and it can completely change how your organization operates

Explainers

The User Experience Journey of a Company Retreat

Even when we design and facilitate offsites for ourselves, we struggle with the challenge of knowing exactly what to cover and how to broach difficult conversations. Here’s how we coach teams, including our own, to overcome those inevitable challenges.

Explainers

How to Retain Knowledge When an Employee Leaves

Whether through retirement or quitting, your team’s makeup will evolve, so make knowledge retention a top priority. Every employee contributes to continuing a company’s best practices, and storing that information requires long-term planning and preparation.

Explainers

What to Do When a Leader Leaves

In the course of our change work, we’ll often see a leader leave an organization. Sometimes it’s because they simply don’t like the way the company is evolving (or the fact that the company is evolving at all), so they opt out. Sometimes it’s the client who realizes that the leader isn’t a good fit anymore, and needs to leave so the rest of the team can flourish. And yes, sometimes it’s a coincidence—a leader finds a better job during a time of change.

Explainers

Digital Transformation Requires Cultural Change

Our clients often want to delay a change program because they want to first implement a new digital tool—they’ll deal with “people change” later. But the reality is that digital transformations don’t fail due to technology: 60% of organizations say that culture is the biggest barrier to digital transformation.

Explainers

How to Balance Optimists and Pessimists on Your Team

In any team environment, it’s never just as straightforward as saying “yes” or “no” to a proposal—there’s a political aspect to being perceived as an optimist or pessimist.

Explainers

When a Teammate Won’t Accept Your Praise

As leaders, we know acknowledging our employees for a job well done helps keep them motivated, especially in the face of ongoing change. Yet sometimes our compliments get a strange reception: the individual stammers or deflects, or worse, acts like they don’t even hear your words of praise!

Explainers

Social Debt: Why Culture Doesn’t Come Later

Business, any business, is just the commercialization of human relationships. Yes, you’re building a product, but you’re actually foremost building a group of people that can work together to produce a product.

Explainers

The Four Types of People You’ll Meet When Implementing Change

Not everyone responds to change the same way. By understanding individuals’ openness to change, you can focus your efforts on the right people, and more rapidly win converts to your cause.

Explainers

Working Through Conflict

While politics and personal differences will always exist, the reality is, most conflict at work is really driven by different interpretations of the shared situation: different priorities, different information, or different perspectives on the mission.

Explainers

Preventing Factions from Flourishing at Work

Politics is a canary in a coal mine for organization design. If you sense people are spending more of their time on impression management than on carrying out the work, an intervention is critical.

Explainers

The Downsides to Incentivizing Innovation

If you need continuous big, bold imaginative ideas to remain ahead of your competitors and in the good graces of your customers, do you need an equally big and bold incentive program for your employees?

Explainers

Building Team Resilience

Change can be disruptive and uncomfortable, so it’s no wonder leaders often ask us how they can help their teams become more resilient. You might think the best way to get a resilient team is to select for resilient people—those who are strong or stoic or mindful, who laugh in the face of danger. But according to some of the most recent scholarly research, it’s better to think of team resilience as a dynamic property of the team as a whole.