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Good Management Skills: Nature or Nurture?

Earlier this year, Gallup issued a fascinating study that looked at why great managers are so rare. It concluded that while one of the most important decisions a company can make is whom they select to manage, companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82 percent of the time. It turns out managers drive 70% of employees’ engagement and experience of work , which makes their role crucial in retaining talent as well as achieving organization goals. The Gallup report goes on to state that about one in ten people possess the talent to manage.

An Execution Framework for Achieving Ambitious Goals

While annual planning and performance reviews are very structured processes, most organizations don’t have structured models for managing execution and goal achievement between plan and review. How are your planned outcomes versus actuals monitored week over week and how much does your approach vary over the course of the year? Loosely structured con calls, staff meetings that don’t address goals, confusion on work ownership, and changing deliverables lists with little accountability are signs that execution is too ad hoc. Without a consistent execution framework, it’s easy to lose time and hard to achieve ambitious goals. For high velocity goal achievement, try

The Truth About What Motivates Millennials at Work

Millennials are the first generation in history to be blessed with instantly-accessible information. An unprecedented one third of those aged 20 to 29 have graduated with a bachelor’s degree. Reading about world catastrophes, Millennials grew up believing in the power of their own volition and mistrusting people in power (only 19% of Gen Y believes others can be trusted, compared to 40% of boomers, according to a Pew Research Study). Equally notable, they are the largest, most multicultural generation to date. Millennials are disrupting norms in the best and worst possible ways, and the future of your workforce rests on their

Want to Be More Successful? Set Goals.

People with goals achieve more and are more successful — a lot more successful — than peers without them, whether they’re scientists, students, or corporate execs. Organizations whose employees are actively engaged in goal achievement have 3x greater operating margins in any given year than companies with lower engagement levels. If you’re not in the habit of setting and measuring goals for your team, then doing so can seem like added complexity. In fact, just the opposite is true. Goals simplify and clarify what your team should do and provide a common definition of success. Instead of trying to read your

Change Agents: Know Thy Audience

Change agents and their ideas are the life force of organizations. Innovation of all kinds is essential for organizations to grow and thrive; in fact, organizations that can more easily respond to new facts and conditions have a great advantage. In their book Super-Flexibility for Knowledge Enterprises, UC Berkeley’s Dr. Homa Bahrami and Carnegie Mellon’s Dr. Stuart Evans tell us that super flexible organizations are the most successful. These organizations have strong “circulatory systems” that foster idea flow, and they execute more dynamically. “Targeted experiments, openness to new data, fact-based assessment, and swift revisions” enable them to succeed while organizations that

4 Ways to Increase Your Goal Achievement

The formula for achieving goals is straightforward: apply team, time and budget to the specific work needed to reach the right results. Very successful people achieve goals faster and with fewer resources than peers; their execution velocity is high, which raises their career velocity. Their capacity to execute is focused on achieving clear goals so they need less time or resources to get from point A to point B; great business and career results follow. Stellar team members gravitate toward these managers, so their teams — and results — get stronger over time. Our capacity is almost always constrained, so how

Achieve Your Leadership Aspirations

Ask most executives and managers if they are great leaders and you’ll hear, “No, but I have every intention of becoming one!” Aligning time, skills and effort to the intention to build leadership skill and capacity is not easy, but it is more important than ever. Two startling studies reveal that 87 percent of employees aren’t actively engaged in their work and 20 percent of those employees undermine value created by more engaged co-workers. What’s more, experts put the blame on how managers spend their time and how effectively they lead. Too much time goes to low level details and not enough

Use OKRs To Achieve Bold Goals

Objectives and Key Results or OKRs have helped hyper-growth Internet companies like Google achieve phenomenal success. They combine ambitious, qualitative goals and quantitative success measures with weekly execution and accountability cadence. When teams institutionalize OKRs, they enjoy clarity of purpose, fast-paced progress, and can achieve game-changing results. Use OKRs to embolden your goals, define how success is measured and achieve execution excellence: 1. Define Ambitious and Inspiring Objectives Create qualitative objectives. The objective is your team’s mission – it becomes personal, inspires people and provides shared purpose. Objectives should be for a set period of time and achievable by your team

Learn to Love Your Customers

On its face, this is a ridiculously high standard, but in practice it’s the most rewarding and resilient way to build a business. Working with and for customers that love your company — rather than hate it or couldn’t care less — is simply a more satisfying way to spend the 60% of your adult life that is work. When they’re crazy about you, they’re generous with ideas, perspectives, praise, and referrals. They’re resilient when you come up short (as you surely will) because one problem rarely empties a deep well of crazy love. In the long haul, it isn’t harder

5 Ways to Manage Stress on the Job

Work can push all our stress buttons: the need to achieve, fear of failing, reliance on others for our own success, overload, self-doubt and more. Ironically, how we respond to these stressors has a direct impact on our success and failure. When we react reflexively, the impact of our actions is often worse than the initial stress trigger. And while too much stress isn’t good, the sensation of stress is an important business signal — it can help us identify what needs our attention. To extract the value of stress but experience and convey less of it: Identify your specific stressors

Invest Your Intelligence Where It Matters

In a particularly creative working session with a young product designer, we arrived at what seemed like a terrific idea with a novel implementation. We’d had one of those brainstorms where ideas built naturally on each other and with them, momentum to a conclusion. We quickly “locked and loaded” on our result and she set off to detail it for development. Luckily, it was a Friday and the weekend created a natural simmering period. By Monday, it was clear we’d overlooked several important things. It was equally clear that time had ripened and enhanced a fundamentally sound idea; what we handed

4 Steps to Less Work Stress

Work stresses people out — fear of failing, pressure to achieve, having to reply on others for our own success, overload, self-doubt and more… In fact, one million Americans call in sick over stress every day and 25% say work is the most stressful thing in their lives. These 4 tips can help you achieve more success and keep your balance, even when things get stressful! 1. Organize Increase your odds of achieving your goals by 64% and eliminate stress by writing down what you need to do to achieve your goals. If you manage a team, ask for transparency on

Goal Alignment: Job One for Managers

Two days before Yolanda’s performance review, she sent a 26-page PowerPoint deck intended to summarize her accomplishments for the year. She’d clearly spent hours on the deck, perhaps more than a day packaging and positioning accomplishments. She’d even asked four colleagues to write emails lobbying for her promotion. Although she’d only been on my marketing and strategy team for 18 months, Yolanda had been in the same role at the same level for more than 5 years. In her mind, this was her year to get ranked at the top of the team and get promoted — the performance model at

The Difference Between Dreamers and Doers

In many ways, setting goals is similar to dreaming of success – goals are desired outcomes. [easy-tweet tweet=”Goals are desired outcomes” user=”@workboardinc” hashtags=”#goals “]But achieving goals (and with them, success) is infinitely harder and more complex. While many things on the road to success like Estée Lauder’s are beyond your control, how you apply your energy toward success is something you have a great deal of control over. To put Estée Lauder’s maxim to work, consider these four tips for using your energy and capacity to achieve greater professional success. 1. Align goals up, then break them down. Make sure you

Where Your Time Goes, So Goes Your Impact

Stephanie Leffler, the dynamic, mission-driven CEO of CrowdSource, carefully controls where her time goes. For years, she’s kept a thorough action item list against her goals and priorities and keeps her old lists — in fact, she looks back at them to see where she spent her time and assess whether time spent produced value for the organization. Turns out, controlling where her time goes and critically assessing whether that time creates real value are exactly what she should do as chief executive officer. According to a recent study on Blue Ocean Leadership in Harvard Business Review, many leaders aren’t aware

Help Managers Be More Effective Leaders

There is a tremendous engagement and execution gap in companies today. According toGallup, only 13% of employees are actively engaged in their work ; 60% of employees don’t understand their organization’s goals and priorities and just 10% of executives sustainably achieve those goals according to Bain & Company’s Chris Zook. In fact, disengaged employees may actively undermine the value created and customers acquired by their more engaged peers – whom they far outnumber. Experts at Gallup and Harvard Business Review agree that the cause of the problem and its $500 billion annual cost is managers at all levels and how they

The 5 Dynamics of Low Performing Teams

High performing teams seem to generate their own energy and elevate everyone on the team to their full potential. Despite achieving more, work on these teams seems less taxing, the workday shorter and less frustrating. Low performing teams are plagued by dysfunction and produce more frustration than progress. What undermines the performance of groups and teams? Poor leadership and low self awareness from team members. The Leader’s Role In Dysfunction The most common leadership failure points are the hardest part of a leaders’ job: getting the wrong people off the team, holding people accountable and giving direct feedback. These aspects of

Dump Corporate Jargon For More Impact

Long before texting brought us LOL, BTW, CU, and TTYL, organizations used acronyms as communication short cuts. Unlike the text substitutes for benign greetings, laughs and sign offs, corporate acronyms tend to substitute for the fundamentals: Names of products, initiatives and departments. The very essence of “who, what and why” in business! Although organizations use acronyms to speed up communication, here are three ways they undermine it and how to break the habit: 1. They Hide And Distance People From Meaning When product or process names are reduced to acronyms, the name conveys no purpose. This contributes to the perception (and

The Five Things Great Bosses Do

Study after study has shown that when you’re great at your job it turns into high employee engagement, which in turn leads to higher profits, better customer service, and happier and healthier employees. Great managers make great contributions to the bottom line: The most engaged, motivated teams are 21% more productive and 22% more profitable Those disengaged teams have a 37% higher absenteeism rate, 25% higher turnover, and 41% more quality defects Managing is hard work, no matter what level of management you’re at. There are expectations to meet from above and below, and plenty of pressure. Driving accountability and delivering

5 Steps to Stellar Year-End Reviews

It’s mid-year review time and if you’re like many people, you haven’t thought about goals in 5.5 months. Not a great moment for manager or team member, but it’s a common one. Mid-year reviews are a painful reminder of how far apart work and goals can drift and how little traditional performance management helps people perform at their best. Just 7% of employees understand their goals and what they need to do to achieve them. The disconnect creates a lot of anxiety: “How could that have happened?” “Why wasn’t I just more disciplined?” and “How will I make up the lost

Is Your Communication Style A Drag On Your Team’s Productivity?

Our verbal and listening habits have a direct effect on our productivity and our professional outcomes. These engagement habits can lead to wasteful debates over false choices and choke off relevant business facts. When ideas and facts flow easily and teams engage in authentic business-driven discussions, productivity and results soar. “Start with a YES and see where that takes you”. – Tina Fey Try these three magic words to improve communication and increase performance, transparency, decision quality and your team’s productivity: 1. Start with YES to encourage information flow. Engage in a way that signals others you’re open to considering their ideas,

3 Tips For Managers To Achieve Business Goals

It’s a few weeks into a new quarter of a new year, so now is a great time to self-assess accomplishments on last quarter’s goals and double down for great execution the rest of the year. Beware three behaviors that undermine goal achievement: 1) too many goals to come anywhere close to achievement, 2) too little attention to goals after they’re set, and 3) inability to compare the value of goals set with new requests and opportunities that arise. After a few quarters, this can create a cycle that makes goal setting seem fruitless and work less fulfilling for leaders, managers

Don’t Just Assess Team Performance, Cultivate It!

For those of us who are managers, now is a good time to consider our role in helping people achieve their potential and in boosting team performance. In addition to assessing what people have done, take the time to consider what you’ve done — and can do — to help them achieve more. Excellence requires opportunity, as does skill building; this is one of the greatest gifts you can give people. It also helps organizations retain employees and improve productivity. Use These Three Tips To Cultivate High Team Performance And Create Opportunity: 1. Self assess your cultivation performance: Reflect on how much

Use Your Time Wisely — You Don’t Have As Much Of It As You Think!

As management guru Peter Drucker once said, “Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.” Time is the greatest lever we have to achieve business goals, yet most leaders don’t measure how it’s spent or manage it as scarce capacity. When time is viewed as an infinite resource, it sets up employee engagement challenges and fatigued thinking. This week, give closer attention and intention to how you leverage time with these 3 practices: Recognize time is a finite resource and plan accordingly. Create a time allocation plan for yourself and your team this morning to

How to Embrace Failure and Make It Work In Your Favor

We all know failure isn’t the end of the world, but it is not easy to embrace. Without clear thinking, fear of failure and failure itself can undermine our leadership styles, performance, judgment and even our happiness. According to one study, workers who feel unsupported not only face higher anxiety, but also experience lower performance. Here are three tips for embracing fear and failure and getting value from them this week: 1. Use fear to focus but don’t let it become your focus Fear is a powerful sensation; it can be a great asset or hold you back. Use it as an

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Deidre Paknad

Deidre Paknad

Good Management Skills: Nature or Nurture?

An Execution Framework for Achieving Ambitious Goals

The Truth About What Motivates Millennials at Work

Want to Be More Successful? Set Goals.

Change Agents: Know Thy Audience

4 Ways to Increase Your Goal Achievement

Achieve Your Leadership Aspirations

Use OKRs To Achieve Bold Goals

Learn to Love Your Customers

5 Ways to Manage Stress on the Job

Invest Your Intelligence Where It Matters

4 Steps to Less Work Stress

Goal Alignment: Job One for Managers

The Difference Between Dreamers and Doers

Where Your Time Goes, So Goes Your Impact

Help Managers Be More Effective Leaders

The 5 Dynamics of Low Performing Teams

Dump Corporate Jargon For More Impact

The Five Things Great Bosses Do

5 Steps to Stellar Year-End Reviews

Is Your Communication Style A Drag On Your Team’s Productivity?

3 Tips For Managers To Achieve Business Goals

Don’t Just Assess Team Performance, Cultivate It!

Use Your Time Wisely — You Don’t Have As Much Of It As You Think!

How to Embrace Failure and Make It Work In Your Favor

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