Category: management

  • Women in leadership

    Women in leadership

    A summary of  Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In

    Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Facebook, presented a TED Talk on why are there so few women in leadership positions. Her book, Lean In started from that 15 minute talk. Sandberg’s argument is that excuses and justifications will not get women anywhere. In her book she provides useful suggestions to urge women to take their place in the working world while taking ownership of a leadership concept. Women have to take a seat at the table, even if they feel uneasy at first, says Sandberg.

    They have to lean in and have the will to lead. She says women have to break with internalised attitudes that hold them back. Throughout the book, Sandberg carefully weighs the double binds, internal and external, that hold back women from achieving their goals, their potential at the workplace.

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    Sandberg’s work is a combination of hard data, academic research, her own experiences, observations and life lessons with a hint of humour. Lean In is more than a book, it’s kind of a feminist manifesto as she calls it; part of a movement to create a more equal world.
    The book is available at amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.

    Agi Galgoczi

  • 3 ways to create a high performance culture

    3 ways to create a high performance culture

     

    Does culture matter? Recent research carried out by James Heskett at Harvard Business School suggests that 20%-30% of corporate performance can be attributed to a positive, strong performance culture. As Edgar Schein, probably the most prolific and oft-quoted researcher and author in the area of culture, suggested: “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.”

    High performance cultures embrace innovation and empower people to contribute to that innovation. They espouse values on taking calculated risks, being innovative, being supportive, and being a learning organisation. Amanda Whittaker Brown of IDeA identified four specific signs of a performance culture and a culture where high performance is an integral part of how the organisation works:

    • People feel comfortable talking openly about performance.
    • Individuals know how what they are doing makes a difference.
    • People share a commitment to achieving shared objectives.
    • When there are problems, people work together to resolve them.

    There are three specific actions leaders can take to create a high performance culture in their organisation:

    1. Co-create the desired culture
    Involve others in designing and shaping the team or organisational culture. In order for you to be able to identify and articulate what a desired culture would be, you need to understand and be able to communicate the vision for the organisation, its purpose and how individuals and teams can contribute. Your team need to be able to understand the difference that they are making.

    Once the vision for the organisation or the team is clear, consider whether the current culture, norms, and behaviours serve it, or whether you need to make some changes. Talk to your team, customers, senior management or board about how they see those objectives and aims being delivered, what your core values are and what type of underlying culture is need.

    Invite your colleagues and stakeholders to co-create the desired culture through conversation. Identify what works well and where changes are needed to enhance individual and organisational performance. Teams and staff can take part in this conversation and feel ownership and accountability, which in turns underpins a performance culture.

    Once you have identified the desired culture, make sure that you are modelling, not just communicating new values and behaviours. If you’re asking other people to change, you need to remember that that will require quite a significant change on your part as well. Agree and describe what high performance looks like, agree how people will work and behave as part of the culture.

    2. Replace a culture of blame with empowerment and accountability
    Develop a culture of empowerment instead of blame, which stifles innovation and creativity. Enable people to take responsibility, to make decisions, to take action. At an organisational level, empowerment is supported by management commitment and relatively few layers of hierarchy. It’s important that people are supported with the right skills so they can take advantage of empowerment. Provide development on teamwork, communication skills, decision making, and risk management or other appropriate areas.

    Ensure that your team has clarity of objectives and corporate priorities and that they are rewarded for doing the right things. Accept mistakes and ensure that people learn from their mistakes.

    Accountability is equally important. It’s not quite enough, from a cultural perspective, for people to be accountable to you because you’re their boss. They actually need to be accountable to each other, so they can say, “We each understand what everyone else’s role is and we each commit to delivering our individual role for the benefit of the team.”

    3. Set high expectations and enable people to meet those expectations
    Maurizio Freda, Estee Lauder CEO said: “You need super talented people who know they need to do fantastically well. When your leadership team takes the same attitude, you create a culture where each one can give his or her best. In particular, you have to find the strengths of each individual in the organisation and then you can create magic.”

    Choose people with lots of potential who have some of the strengths that you’re looking for, and allow them to play to their strengths.

    Provide a combination of high support and high challenge. Set the expectation that people have to do well in this organisation, that you are aiming for excellence and that you trust that people can meet these expectation as they are supported and set up for success. People can meet those high expectations because they get to play to their strengths, they get the development that they need, and if they make mistakes these are looked at as learning opportunities.

    These three leadership activities help you embody Schein’s statement that “Leaders are the main designers and builders of an organisation’s culture.”


    Eszter Molnar Mills is a strength-based leadership and organisation development specialist and founder of Formium Development. A qualified executive and team coach, she helps organisations and individuals reach enhanced performance by reflecting on what works, and developing skills and strategies for improvement. Through team coaching and facilitation Eszter also helps organisations and teams work together to develop positive and productive cultures.

  • The magic of freedom?

    The magic of freedom?

    British training company Happy Ltd has been rated best for customer service and work/life balance among many other awards. Henry Stewart, Chief Executive, has written a book about the story of Happy and its achievements. The book has a clear tone, comes with real-life examples, provides evidence where required and poses thought-provoking questions – overall an enjoyable read. From the title you can guess you will find a public declaration of the methods, views and motives of the author.

    Stewart’s Happy Manifesto is based on ten points:

    The-Happy-Manifesto

    Most of the points are about giving freedom to your people and trusting them. With his book Stewart aims to help the reader put in place the structure that makes freedom and trust possible in his/her organisation.

    The Happy Manifesto shows an aspirational alternative, it can help some managers and organisations but it is still not a panacea which will “Make Your Organisation a Great Place to Work – Now!” Don’t get me wrong, it is a great book, the idea has potential but I can’t see how it could be applied in every case. I find it hard to believe that all employees can work without rules, and in my experience not every manager has the freedom to influence the structure, choose their people and put together a dream-team. If managers don’t have the freedom to choose people for their team, or if they inherit an existing team with set preferences and habits, further work will be needed before they can provide the level of freedom suggested.

    It is apparent throughout the book that Stewart believes in guidelines rather than rules. He says managers don’t give enough freedom to their staff and it could be much more effective if your people made most decisions themselves. Stewart describes the hierarchy of management needs, based on Maslow’s well-known pyramid, which highlights workplace safety, comfort, reward and communication as necessary but insufficient for motivation.

    Stewart proceeds to expand on organisational approaches to develop challenge, support, trust and freedom as the management behaviours leading to high performance.

    Book details:
    Henry Stewart: The Happy Manifesto: Make Your Organization a Great Workplace;
    Kogan Page; 1 edition (3 Jan. 2013)

  • Join us for the 2016 Strengths Challenge

    Join us for the 2016 Strengths Challenge

    Can you hear it? There’s a revolution occurring in our workplaces, and it’s being led by employees – want to join in?

    If you’re fed up with a job that drains your energy, a boss who undermines your confidence and the financial handcuffs that rob you of making the choices you desire, there’s a campaign underway and it’s aimed at restoring people’s happiness.

    It’s called the 2016 Strengths Challenge and we are delighted to be supporting it.

    You see, a decade ago 63% of us believed we’d grow most at work in our area of weaknesses. As a result, only a third of us could name our strengths – those things we’re good at and enjoy doing.

    But today it’s all changing.

    Earlier this year it was discovered that 64% of us now believe building on our strengths will make us more successful at work. In the 2015 Strengths@Work Survey people who said they had the chance to use their strengths each day at work reported:

    • Being more engaged and energized
    • Believing what they do makes a difference and is appreciated
    • Feeling like they are consistently flourishing

    How are they pulling it off?

    Join Michelle McQuaid, the VIA Institute, Live Happy and people from all over the world for a one-week strengths challenge and find out how just 11-minutes of doing what you do best each day can make all the difference in your job.

    All you have to do is register your details here  and get ready to feel more confident, engaged and happy at work starting on 8 February 2016.

  • Book Summary: Switch – How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

    Book Summary: Switch – How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

    Over the last few decades a dispiriting body of research has been amassed, which suggests that the vast majority of change programmes fail, or fail to reach their intended outcomes. In their book Switch – How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, academics Chip and Dan Heath address this challenge head on.

    The authors argue that we all have both an emotional and a rational side, which they portray as the elephant and the rider – for their relative roles and power.

    They suggest that the emotional (elephant) and rational (rider) sides have different needs and limitations that we have to address for change to be successful. Furthermore, we can also smooth the path to make change as easy as possible.

    The Switch model outlines three sets of actions to support each of the elephant, rider and path. The aspects of the model are therefore to:

    Direct the rider by

    • Following the bright spots: ‘Investigate what’s working and clone it.’
    • Scripting the critical moves by specifying the exact desired behaviours.
    • Pointing to the destination, making the desired outcome, its purpose and benefits clear.

    Motivate the elephant by

    • Finding the feeling: allowing people to feel an emotion about the subject, rather than just think about it.
    • Shrinking the change into a manageable size until it ‘no longer spooks the Elephant.’
    • Growing your people to meet the challenges through development and encouraging a growth mindset.

    Shape the path by

    • Tweaking the environment so that it supports and encourages behaviour change.
    • Building habits, so that the new behaviour becomes automatic and no longer requires willpower.
    • Rallying the herd through modelling the new behaviour approach and building on social pressure to help it spread.

    The Heaths have created a leadership book with great – but all too rare – balance. The Switch model and their recommendations are based on robust research from business, management, psychology and even international development.

    These are then presented in a very accessible and readable book with lots of case studies and illustrative examples that both ‘point to the destination’ and allow us to ‘find the feeling’, resulting in an inspirational and immediately actionable read for leaders looking to make organisational or personal changes.

    Switch – How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath is available at amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.  Additional resources are available from heathbrothers.com. The book is reviewed by Eszter Molnar Mills.

    Eszter Molnar Mills is a strength-based leadership and organisation development specialist and founder of Formium Development. She helps organisations and individuals reach enhanced performance by reflecting on what works, and developing skills and strategies for improvement.

  • Edison’s method – Collaboration is the key

    Edison’s method – Collaboration is the key

    The light bulb; just a simple object in your everyday life. We need it at home, in the office, on the street, almost everywhere. Thomas Edison frequently receives credit for inventing the light bulb (inspite of the efforts of inventors such as  Davy and Swan who came before him). We tend to imagine every great innovator alone in their basement laboratory working on their greatest ideas. But most of them don’t work alone, just as Edison did not invent the light bulb all by himself – he had a team.

    In her book, Midnight Lunch, Edison’s great-grandniece Sarah Miller Caldicott outlines how you can use Edison’s collaboration methods to strengthen your team, whether face-to-face or virtually. It is a four-step process and all the processes within each phase are designed to link together, becoming a self-referencing system.

    The first phase is Capacity; select small teams of 2 to 8 people of varied specialisms. Diversity of strengths will bring the diversity of perspectives. Everybody can learn from each other and the small number is important to create an environment of collegiality.

    Context is the next facet where effective collaboration leads to innovation. It involves individual then collective study of the problem and experimenting with potential ways forward. Learn from the mistakes and use them to create new contexts. Discuss them with your team, listen to every individual, the diversity of the team will increase the possible number of solutions.

    The third “C” is Coherence. There can be disagreements within every team. Step in and encourage a renewed discovery of the purpose with your team, the common goal that binds them together. Teams without a shared purpose are just groups of people. Every team needs an inspirational leader who can step in when it is needed.

    Complexity is the last phase. You can find ideas in the book for how to manage the complexity of collaboration from reskilling the members of your team to leaving a “footprint” as a guide to the next generation, or to other teams.

    Caldicott’s Midnight Lunch is not always an easy read, in order to follow the self-referencing system attentive reading is required. It is a challenging book that can make you rethink how you structure, manage and lead your teams. It offers a number of practical collaboration tools – straight from Thomas Edison’s laboratory – that you can use during your leadership journey.
    Midnight Lunch by Sarah Miller Caldicott is available on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.

  • Managers to leaders – Business Innovators Radio interview

    Managers to leaders – Business Innovators Radio interview

    Meeting the organisational and individual challenges of excellent leadership is crucial for any business.

    Formium Development Director Eszter Molnar Mills was interviewed for Business Innovators Radio on leadership challenges and how harnessing strengths and investing in development can mitigate these.

    You can listen to the interview on iTunes, or visit http://businessinnovatorsmagazine.com/eszter-molnar-mills-managers-to-leaders/ where you an also read the accompanying article for Business Innovators Magazine.

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