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Is the latest management strategy a trend that will help your organization, or is it just a passing fad?

Seth Godin says it best: “You can’t stand out if you fit in all the way.”

Since we began our careers as consultants, we have watched leaders who feel like they have to follow the latest management trend, struggle to figure out how to apply it to their organization. While I admit that there are some good management trends that we can apply to our teams and organizations, it’s difficult to see the amount of resources that go into implementing the newest trends when they don’t seem to be benefiting the organization. Those resources could have been better spent in hiring the right people, inventing new products, improving the customer experience, shortening delivering times, lowering costs, increasing sales and improving profits.

What are some of the more well known management strategies that we have experienced?

• Quality Circles
• Management by Objectives (MBO)
• Management by Walking Around (MBWA)
• Total Quality Management
• Re-Engineering
• Lean Manufacturing
• One Minute Management
• Empowerment
• Accountability
• Competencies
• Six Sigma
• Learning Organization
• Peak Performance
• Right Sizing
• Employees Are Our Most Valued Asset
• Dilbert (We had to add one for the cynics)

Continue reading “Management Fads” »

From the September 2011 Quest for Leadership Excellence Newsletter (sign up)

Managing multiple priorities, taming the email beast, and achieving work-life balance are all contemporary buzz terms for learning how to stay on top of our demanding jobs and schedules. Whatever you call the approach, the aim is always to help us improve our efficiency, achieve our goals, and feel good about ourselves and the outcome. In this Quest, we are going to tackle just one aspect of time management… how to stay on top of your email.

According to Pingdom, (an Internet company that monitors and troubleshoots websites and servers), in 2010 approximately 107 trillion email messages were sent globally, with an average of 294 billion messages being sent daily. It is hard to envision what 294 billion even looks like, but we know for sure, based on what we hear from leaders in our seminars, that email overload is both rampant and toxic today.

Leaders are telling us that they routinely receive hundreds of emails each day, and feel buried under a continuous stream of important and not so important messages. Last week, one frustrated manager confided in us and said, “I’ve got messages in my inbox that are more than a year old and, I still haven’t taken action.”

Continue reading “Take Control of Your Email Inbox” »

The Coaching Discussion Model

On Tuesday, we shared some tips on how to address employee issues when they occur. Our goal was to help you get the employee to acknowledge inappropriate behaviors and come up with a plan for what he/she will do differently in the future. Today, we’ll give you some guidelines for addressing more challenging, reoccurring behaviors . . . issues that you have addressed in the past, but the problem hasn’t been resolved. This is where the coaching discussion comes in.

The purpose of the coaching discussion is to redirect the employee’s behavior. You want the employee to stop the inappropriate behavior and start demonstrating appropriate behavior. It is a two-way process, a discussion. The intended purpose is for the employee to be engaged in the discussion as well. In fact, the employee should be talking more than the supervisor or the manager. Using the following six steps of the Coaching Discussion Model will make your coaching discussions effective.

Continue reading “Coaching Employees” »

If you are a leader, chances are good that you have had at least one employee in your career who has caused you to lose sleep. Maybe the employee is frequently late, is participating in gossip or is making reoccurring mistakes. Our advice for difficult behaviors in employees is to train them, coach them and if that still doesn’t work, share them with a competitor.

When you address the issue appropriately, it may even shed light on a behavior that employee wasn’t aware that was an issue. Open up the lines of communication through the following actions:

Remain calm. If you have ever driven home from work saying, “Now, why did I say that?” chances are you may have regretted giving feedback to an employee when you were mad. If you are angry or emotional, postpone the discussion until you are feeling more in control. Remember, communication is permanent. Do not lose control of the discussion or say something that may later come back to haunt you.

Continue reading “How to Handle a Difficult Employee” »