Today’s reading is – IT Hiring: How Thomson Reuters’ CIO Identifies Cultural Fit – a recent piece appearing in the CIO newsletter. It features an interview of Kelli Crane, senior vice president and CIO of Thomson Reuters by Beth Ehrgott.
For today’s Tuesday Reading, we turn to a Harvard Business School Working Knowledge Q&A – “How Team Leaders Show Support – or Not”– with HBS faculty member Teresa Anabile.
Though from 2004, the findings remain valid. Professor Anabile’s research points to two key concepts for leaders who want to gain their staff’s confidence:
1. Perceptions of team leader support are more positive when the leader
- gives timely feedback
- support the team member’s actions and decisions
For today’s reading we turn to John Baldoni’s blog at the Harvard Business Review for his piece “How to Make People Passionate About Their Work”.
Baldoni notes that generating passion for what you do is essential, and doubly so in difficult times. He goes on to say that it is essential for a leader to have passion as it is vital to convincing others that their work matters.
He offers three suggestions for cultivating passion:
There’s lots of advice on finding and attracting staff and on identifying and retaining top performers you already have. Stephen DeMaio, in a recent blog entry – “How to Identify Employees’ Hidden Talents” – argues that it is even more important to look for your current staff's hidden strengths to find new skills and talents that have value to the organization.
DeMano suggests four approaches:
Well-integrated, high-performing teams, teams that “click,” is the subject of today's Tuesday Reading – “How Leaders Get Their Teams To ‘Click’” by Phil Harken. Such teams never lose slight of their goals and are largely self-sustaining. They often seem to take on a life of their own. Studies by the European Centre for Organizational Research show that teams that “click” always have a “leader who creates the environment and establishes the operating principles and values that are conducive to high performance.”
Today’s Tuesday Reading is from the April 28, 2009 Ask Annie column of Fortune Magazine: “How to work better with Gen Y”. The April 28th question has to do with working with a new class of interns – Generation Y individuals; birth years 1978-1990 – who are very much like our younger employees.
John Maxwell, a very prolific writer on leadership, is the author of our Tuesday Reading for today: “Influence: Connecting with People”.
Maxwell’s thesis is straightforward; ... “until leaders learn the art of connection, their influence remains minimal.” To help us make connections, he offers eight practical steps:
1. Don’t take people for granted.
2. Possess a difference-maker mindset.
3. Initiate movement toward people; take the first step.
Today’s Tuesday Reading is “Stay Out of the Bunker”from the New York Times Under New Management column. There Kelly Holland says that even though this may be a very challenging time for managers, employees still need leadership if they are to function effectively. She suggests seven behaviors for leaders:
For today’s reading we turn to advice from José Carlos Eiras, former CIO of DHL-Express US and also European CIO and Global Services Information Officer at General Motors, found in “Practical Advice for CIOs Struggling to Survive in Tough Times".
After talking briefly about the choices IT leaders struggling with tough times -- either ”hunker down and wait timidly for fate,“ or ”seize the moment“ -- Eiras advocates seizing the moment and makes seven recommendations:
