Posts Tagged: leadership

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12
Feb 10

Decisiveness

Herding Cats Quote of the Day:

If I had to sum up in a word what makes a good manager, I’d say decisiveness. You can use the fanciest computers to gather the numbers, but in the end you have to set a timetable and act.

—Lido Anthony (Lee) Iacocca

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4
Jan 10

We Trust You

Matt from SvN on control via trust:

A lot of companies seek to control employees. They have handbooks and policies. They monitor emails. They make rules about what’s allowed and what’s forbidden. [...]

Imagine an employee handbook that just said: “We trust you. Be mischievous.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. If the company trusts you with corporate secrets, company property, and access to production servers … maybe the policies on appropriate use of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are misplaced.

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28
Oct 09

Fight as if you are right, listen as if you are wrong

Bob Sutton believes you should “Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held.”

This seems to me to be good advise, and one that I’m going to work on. Apparently he has a whole book written about this type of thing.

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26
Oct 09

The economy is causing unhappiness at work

The Economist on unhappiness at work:

“A survey by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy, found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of employees who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%; the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%.”

The article puts the primary blame on the poor economy, but also suggests that micro-measuring employees (how many times did you smile at a customer today?) and mixed messages about company loyalty play a significant role.

Bob Sutton discusses the data further. Particularly, he is interested in how companies will fare when the economy returns.

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18
Oct 09

Dumbest Practices Used By U.S. Companies

Bob Sutton ponders a few dumb practices, but my favorite one comes from his reader, Pat in the comments:

Rewarding Firefighters not Fire Inspectors.

In other words, the people spotting the problems and fixing them before the “fire” do not get rewards. The “firefighters” who rush and put out fires in progress do get reward.

But which is better for the company?

Once the fire starts, damage is already being done. “Fires” are stressful and distracting – but never seen a company yet that actively makes sure that fires don’t happen. But seen lots of companies that reward the firefighters ( even when they were the “pyromaniacs” )

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