As a business leader, you want to stay on top of the latest trends in employee development and retention. The rapidly evolving human capital management (“HCM”) field is full of innovation and change, and there are some great ideas out there you can adapt to your own team’s development. But since...
Innovation
Speaking Truth To Power – Why Leaders Keep Fools Nearby
In researching Speaking Truth to Power to help people use their own deep wisdom to advance their careers, I stumbled on this great article by James O'Toole on Harvard Business Review called A Culture of Candor. O'Toole gave several examples of corporate cultures that encourage people to challenge...
Change Leadership: Maximizing your ROL (Return on Luck)
Sure, sometimes you’re the lucky recipient of spontaneous innovation, but according to business gurus, consistently good innovators actually have strategies for leveraging luck (the good and the bad) when it trips across their paths. In “Great by Choice” Jim Collins and Morten Hansen have...
How To Maintain And Use Group Power – Book Review of The PRIMES by Chris McGoff
A PRIME is a pattern or principle that reliably comes into play when people gather in a group. This observable pattern – once named and shared with the group – goes from being an unconscious pattern to a manageable dynamic. Use the PRIMES to increase your team’s power. A powerful group makes a more powerful leader.
Innovative Leadership 101: Develop a Perspective Protocol
Sometimes we have to accept the reality that innovation can’t always be planned, but when we find a pattern to help us increase the likelihood of spontaneity – why not try to learn it and bake it into the corporate culture? In their new book “Great by Choice,” Jim Collins and Morten Hansen have...
Managers: Are You Ready to Hire Bots onto Your Teams?
Yes, the Robots are coming, and they’re (probably) going to change how you manage people. Have you noticed that the buzz about artificial intelligence (AI) and automation has been picking up in the last 4-6 months? I watch the tech space pretty compulsively and for years the dreamers would talk...
Why Is Leading Innovation So Hard?
Innovation so often happens in the unplanned places. This is something of a conundrum for many leaders whose manufacturing B-School heritage tells them that everything should be planned out, documented and accounted for. Innovation – like its sister creativity – cannot be planned, budgeted, shoved into a “retreat” or predicted. It happens in the shower and in the in-between spaces of life and work.
Leading innovation is difficult because you have to risk looking like a fool. But when the great leader looks beneath the surface of the failures innovative playtime produces, they often discover that in those failures are seeds of success. Sometimes it’s a specific idea that results, sometimes it’s just reenergized employees, which can pay back in employee creativity, retention and improved customer service.
Innovation is a personal skill too. Here are three things you can do to create space for innovation in your life.
3 Ways the Millennial Generation Can Help Your Company Get Real
As a species humans love to complain, and we seem to really love to complain about the younger generations. However, it’s time to give the kid-bashing a rest and look at the ways that working with the millennial generation (18-30 years old) helps us be better leaders and build better companies....
Behind Closed Doors – Avoiding the Corporate “Snowden Effect”
Edward Snowden’s revelations of what the National Security Agency (NSA) knows about us have gotten us talking about the role of secrecy in a free society. This is an important conversation, despite the fact that Snowden and the press seem to have shifted from principle-driven to ego-driven...
[INFOGRAPHIC] The Top Cities for Female Entrepreneurs
The number of female entrepreneurs is on the rise and (thanks in part to Lean In) so is their optimism about growth opportunities for their business. Where are the best cities in America for female small business owners to thrive, and what are the best ways to get to the top? Check out the graphic...