Every year in August, I write new course outlines, with objectives, tasks, roles and deadlines identified for students. The university requires it and students expect it. From a leadership perspective, this is […]
Getting Your Ducks in a Row
#Leadership Basics: Getting Things Done
We live in a VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Our VUCA world is one of the contributing factors to our need for greater leadership skills in the workplace. And […]
Celebrating the “Small People”: Getting Things Done
Two years ago, Carl Henric Svanberg, the Chairman of the Board of British Petroleum commented on the impact of the U.S. Gulf Oil Spill that was caused by a BP deep water […]
Your teams are less effective than you think…
Effective teams have good decision-making processes based on evidence and critical thinking. Most teams aren’t effective decision-makers. One of the most profound ways to improve team decision-making is to ensure that all […]
Empowerment & #Leadership
Empowerment is a crucial tool in our modern leadership toolkit. We write and talk about “empowering” our people constantly – Google the term empowerment; you’ll get nine million search results. Empowerment has […]
The Downside of Proactivity
A while ago I wrote a post on “proactive” behaviour, talking about the risks of encouraging people to be proactive, but then ignoring their input. One of my readers recently posted this […]
What is Proactive Behaviour?
Being proactive is good, right? Most of the available literature on strategy, leadership and effectiveness in the workplace supports the idea that leveraging our human capital, by encouraging them to behave in […]
Playing Well Together: Working in Teams
The millennial generation struggles to work well in teams. Just ask them. They will tell you. And so will their employers. Ability to work in teams has been identified by employers as an important […]
Diversity: Good and Bad
Getting ready to teach the teams and groups classes in my organizational behaviour course, I started to think about diversity and how it affects teams. Students today are growing up with more […]
Playing Well With Others: Being on Time Matters
I recently supervised a make-up exam. I couldn’t believe it, students were wandering in ten minutes late to an exam. Like the start time is optional. It made me start to think about […]
Engaging Half Your Workforce: Working with Introverts
In its October 2010 issue, Psychology Today discusses introversion. Which got me thinking about the way we do business in the West. Our society is skewed toward the extrovert, yet according to […]
Millennial Students Show a Decline in Empathy for Others
Dr. Sara Konrath, of the University of Michigan, presented a meta analysis of recent studies of empathetic concern, at the American Association of Psychological Sciences this past weekend. What she found was concerning. American […]
Thinking is Hard Work 