Management Minute Articles

Leaders need to focus their organizations on where they want to go. We mistakenly search for the one big thing that will create success. Success comes from the aggregation of marginal gains. It comes from making a large number of very small changes that collectively generate the momentum needed.

All employees can have meaningful influence. There are certain times when we all risen to the occasion in exceptional or unexpected ways. We can look back and think of times when we were at our best or when we may have been in a “moment of greatness.”

Great leaders support employees who are innovative and disrupt the status quo. Real growth in the market only occurs when organizations continually adapt and innovate to offer relevant value. Leaders need to create a safe way for new ideas to be expressed and developed.

Great leaders rely on evidence. Evidence-based management (EBM) has been discussed for decades as a superior way for managers and leaders to make decisions. We’ll look at the evidence for evidence-based management and review the what, why, and how of EBM.

How do leaders inspire meaningful change? Executives are discovering that for them to lead better, they need to focus on living better. In this era of fast-paced change, rather than working harder, executives might consider slowing down and looking inward for opportunities to reinvent themselves.

Leadership requires imagination. How are new ideas formed and how do they result in the discovery of opportunities? What happens in the mind of successful entrepreneurs that leads to new value creation? As it turns out, the source of generating new ideas is imagination.

Leaders can learn the art of downsizing. The downsizing process can lead to long-term higher performance and both the people who leave and the people who remain can feel honored and validated. The culture can be ennobling and the organization can exceed expectations, even in times of crisis.

Leaders at all levels will continue to face a future of unknown difficulties and challenges. They will need to be able to refocus their leadership development strategies by better understanding and placing leaders’ challenges at the center of development.

In response to the Great Resignation, companies have pulled out all the stops to keep the talent they have from walking out the door. Perhaps the most common tactic is to increase compensation. Many companies are promising more flexible work arrangements.

Implementation is the harder half of strategy and often where strategic efforts fail. Lessons learned from the field of marketing can provide new insights for leaders and HR professionals with regard to human capital and strategy implementation.

Executives can make a meaningful difference in addressing the dearth of women in leadership. It is time for organizational leaders – those who bear the stewardship of power – to move from commitment to action, and show how executives can enculturate greater inclusivity of women in their companies.