Posts

Human Performance Management Best Practice 11 – Color Coding

/in , /by

StrategyDriven Human Performance Management Best Practice ArticleToday’s industrial complexes and office spaces employ vast numbers of redundant systems so to ensure continued operations in the event of equipment failure. Consequently, those who operate and maintain these systems are constantly challenged to perform their work on the appropriate equipment train. In order to avoid wrong-train accidents, operators and maintainers should employ error reduction tools that help them identify the appropriate system train on which to conduct their work.

Hi there! Gain access to this article with a StrategyDriven Insights Library – Total Access subscription or buy access to the article itself.

Subscribe to the StrategyDriven Insights Library

Sign-up now for your StrategyDriven Insights Library – Total Access subscription for as low as $15 / month (paid annually).

Subscribe Now!

Not sure? Click here to learn more.

 Buy the Article

Don’t need a subscription? Buy access to Human Performance Management Best Practice 11 – Color Coding for just $2!

Access the Article Now!

Return to the Human Performance Management Forum

About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Moving on from ROI to ROE, a Return on Empathy

/in , /by

Business has always concentrated on Return on Investment (ROI) as the primary metric to calculate success. However, innovations in the neurosciences to developments in social media have revealed that profitability should no longer be relegated to sales figures and profit margins alone. Increasingly, to create sustainable customer relationships, businesses must attend to innovations in psychology, and invest in the emotional needs of their customers. Those making this shift will gain a significant ROE – Return on Empathy.

Investing in Empathy

A business that invests in empathy devotes itself to understanding the emotional needs and motivations of its customers, and aligns itself to meet them. Companies have increasingly embraced the role of emotion in selling products and services, but often merely pay lip service to its importance, without understanding how to harness it.

We know human motivation is extremely complex – typically people don’t say what they think, or even think what they report. As a result significant business resources are wasted buy an over-reliance on market research that poses only rational questions but neglects to probe customers’ emotional reactions that lie hidden within their answers. When businesses look beyond the rational data, and into the meaning behind their customers’ feelings, and behaviors, they will recognize the human needs that drive decision making.

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!


 

About the Author

Mark Ingwer PhD is a consumer psychologist and the managing partner of Insight Consulting Group, a global marketing and strategy consultancy specializing in market research and consumer insights. He has over 25 years of experience applying his unique blend of psychology, marketing, and business acumen to helping companies optimize their brand and marketing strategy based on an in-depth understanding of their customers. He is the author of the book, Empathetic Marketing published by Palgrave.

Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, part 3 of 6

/in /by

Leadership Role #2: Declaring a Mission

By articulating a vision, a leader opens up certain possible paths to the future while closing others. Using our computer industry example, if software is what will be profitable, then it makes little sense to shift resources into hardware production. Apple also made this mistake, and until the advent of the iPod, the company was relegated to being a small player in a vast market.

Out of a vision, a leader can declare a mission, or in other words, a ‘game.’ His team commits to playing a game that will create the organization’s future. A vision, then, is about the world and the impact we aim to produce, whereas a mission is a declaration of how we intend to position ourselves in this world and the results we are committed to achieving.

In declaring a mission, a leader is requesting that the organization align its actions behind certain strategic roles and objectives. The first requirement for creating a powerful and coherent mission is to ensure these roles and objectives are based on an explicitly stated vision, or interpretation of the world. Lacking this, a mission may degenerate into little more than a cheerleading slogan.

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!


 

About the Author

Chris Majer, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Human Potential ProjectChris Majer, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Human Potential Project, is the author of The Power to Transform: Passion, Power, and Purpose in Daily Life (Rodale), which teaches the strategies corporate, military, and sports leaders have used to positively transform themselves and their organizations in a way readers can adept to their own lives and professions. He may be reached at www.humanpotentialproject.com.

The Advisor’s Corner – Does working smarter, not harder apply to leadership positions?

/in /by

Does working smarter, not harder apply to leadership positions?Question:

Can “working smarter, not harder” really be applied to leadership positions?

StrategyDriven Response: (by Roxi Hewertson, StrategyDriven Principal Contributor)

Of course! Leaders already work hard if they are successful with their teams and organizations. The heart of the question is not: “how hard to squeeze the orange,” but rather, “how, with less effort and time, one can get as much healthy juice from the same orange – and perhaps even have time left to plant a new tree.”

Time: Your use of time is first on the list because it is a significant choice point. You make many choices about how you spend yours and others’ time. Once you lose your time or theirs, you will never get it back. So pay close attention to choices around time, and make good ones.

We waste a LOT of time in lousy meetings. Make sure you are running effective meetings that actually matter. Have a goal, ensure that 20 percent or less is devoted to information sharing, have a good agenda, get the right people in the room, and plan to have the meeting facilitated well. Get people engaged and working on meaningful things. You know you’ve done well when people ask when they can get together again like this!

Conflicts: Deal quickly and well with issues that arise because unresolved conflicts drain huge quantities of energy out of the system and from you and your team. When people ‘workaround’ each other, they travel a much greater distance and these problems don’t go away, they grow tentacles and spread everywhere.

Build Your Team: Build a strong team and support them in doing what they do best. It is FAR smarter, cheaper, faster to take time upfront to build strength and skills within your teams – where people feel safe to contribute, know their roles and expectations, trust each other to do their jobs well, and utilize the power of group synergy to create a result greater than the sum of their parts. This is often misnamed the “touchy-feely” work. Wrong! The leader who ignores this reality, ignores it at their own peril. The fact is, and always has been – jumping to task is just not smart. It takes much more time to clean up the messes that arise, and there is far less engagement from the people meant to do the task.

Delegate Well: You can’t do it all yourself, so don’t even try. Get smarter about how and who should be doing what, when. Delegation is about developing your people through giving them NEW work that grows them and liberates you at the same time. You can then apply your time and skill sets more effectively.

Work-Life Integration: Some leaders believe working hard equals putting in long hours and making the job the biggest priority in their lives. Usually one or more of these situations/needs are in play:

  • They don’t want to go home for any number of reasons.
  • They think/assume/know the culture and the boss expects them to be a workaholic and/or think they will impress someone(s) by doing so and that impression will lead to some kind of reward.
  • They waste a good amount of time during normal working hours and have to get the work done after hours.

A truly effective leader knows how to get the job done in a reasonable amount of time AND keep her/his personal life and overall health well integrated. Of course there are special situations we all need to double-down for, but reasonable is the norm.

Founders are an exception. They often live in, through, and with their business; there is little distinction between who they are and what they do at play, work, or home. Life, for them, is ALL about their business and they chose that life consciously.

The rest of us need to take a much closer look at how we can get more good juice out of the same orange, by being smarter, by thinking in new ways, and without killing ourselves or our people.

About the Author

Leadership authority Roxana (Roxi) Hewertson is a no-nonsense business veteran revered for her nuts-and-bolts, tell-it-like-it-is approach and practical, out-of-the-box insights that help both emerging and expert managers, executives and owners boost quantifiable job performance in various mission critical facets of business. Through AskRoxi.com, Roxi — “the Dear Abby of Leadership” — imparts invaluable free advice to managers and leaders at all levels, from the bullpen to the boardroom, to help them solve problems, become more effective and realize a higher measure of business and career success.

The StrategyDriven website was created to provide members of our community with insights to the actions that help create the shared vision, focus, and commitment needed to improve organizational alignment and accountability for the achievement of superior results. We look forward to answering your strategic planning and tactical business execution questions. Please email your questions to [email protected].

Documented and Retained Causal and Action Intelligence

/in , /by

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice ArticlePerformance measures reflect the organization’s successes and shortfalls over extended periods of time. Well-maintained metrics include a periodic performance analysis summary capturing underlying drivers and associated follow-on actions. These summaries, however, are typically overwritten with the next analysis rather than being preserved; robbing leaders of critical lessons learned information that could support future performance improvements and more rapid decision-making.

Hi there! Gain access to this article with a StrategyDriven Insights Library – Total Access subscription or buy access to the article itself.

Subscribe to the StrategyDriven Insights Library

Sign-up now for your StrategyDriven Insights Library – Total Access subscription for as low as $15 / month (paid annually).

Subscribe Now!

Not sure? Click here to learn more.

Buy the Article

Don’t need a subscription? Buy access to Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice 29 – Documented and Retained Causal and Action Intelligence for just $2!

Access the Article Now!

 

About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.