Dan and Chip Heath, who wrote "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die," are two of my favorite authors. Recently, they wrote a column titled "Make Goals not Resolutions" which appeared in the February 2008 issue of Fast Company.
Too often, we take people for granted. In this week’s Tuesday Reading “Staff Retention: The Power of Appreciation at Work”, Mike Robbins quotes the U.S. Department of Labor as noting that 64% of Americans who leave their jobs say they do so because they don’t feel appreciated. And, Gallup reports that 70% of people in the U.S. say they received no praise or recognition in the workplace.
Have you ever had a manager who was abrasive on your staff? You know, the person who causes you headaches, who have aggressive management styles that create interpersonal friction, reduce motivation and trust to rubble, and disrupt work well beyond the group they lead. In “Taming the Abrasive Manager: Words from the Boss Whisperer”, Laura Crawshaw, president of the Executive Insight Development Group, has some good words of advice.
Here's the "Tuesday Reading" I sent out today to everyone who has been in the IT Leaders Program over the past several years. Based upon the discussion Saturday, I'm sending it along to you as well.
During the course of a Leadership Program many of the participants ask how to conduct effective meetings and even more groan under the impact of the meetings on their calendars. This weeks reading, Eight Steps to More Effective Meetings which can be found at <http://www.cio.com/article/141300/Eight_Steps_to_More_Effective_Meetings>, provides s
During a 2005 guest lecture at MIT’s Sloan School of Management the following question was asked: “What should you be learning in business school?” Jack Welch answered: “Just concentrate on networking. Everything else you need to know, you can learn on the job.”
As it nears the end of the year, it seems appropriate for the Tuesday Reading to turn to the future. In “A Roadmap for IT Leadership and the Next Ten Years” <http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EQM0626.pdf> Tim Chester, CIO at Texas A&M at Qatar, argues that the future requires that CIOs and other IT leaders become technology advocates and not leaders of technology mechanics. So, take a deep breadth, sit back and think carefully about your technology leadership role in the coming years.
Early last month, I was talking with with a businessman who is now the president of a small college in New York. In the course of our conversation, he noted how rude his faculty were to one another. I couldn’t help reflecting on the rudeness I had observed among IT staff members during my two decades at CIO -- personal attacks, ignoring colleagues who had a different point of view, dominating conversations, interruptions, and the list goes on.
In “Situational Awareness 101”, John Baldoni points out that “A sound sense of situational awareness is vital to leadership decision making. A leader must know context (what is happening), circumstance (what has happened) and consequence (what could happen) at all times.”
In “Making Strategy That Sticks", Susan Cramm points out that all too often when we develop a strategy, we focus on getting the right content rather than getting the right commitment. She writes: ”The acid test of strategy is whether it informs and constrains decision making by compelling leaders to align their functional goals and day-to-day decision making to the goals of the enterprise. The only way to accomplish this is through communication and collaboration. The process of aligning people’s hearts and mind