Anastasia Ksenofontova shares an article designed to help overcome and improve perceived divisions between sales and production departments. Salespeople sell what they know rather than what the clients need. They use personal connections rather than industrial or functional competencies to close the deals. Salespeople do not fully understand the products they are selling. On the other hand, production or service delivery cannot provide what the salespeople have promised. Technicians do not know how to talk to customers. The production/service delivery…

Xavier Lederer shares a company post that explains how to be more persuasive when leading a team through misunderstanding or disagreements. It felt like the only thing we could agree on, is that we couldn’t agree on anything. Have you been there before? We had been discussing our 10-year vision for 45 minutes with the board of directors, and the conversation was going in circles between two opposing views. I felt stuck. I was championing one of these views, I…

Mason Adair shares an article on the benefits of moving outside of clearly defined roles.  When talented design, marketing and product people collaborate, great things can happen. However, especially in newly formed teams, significant overlap in these roles can leave teams mired in the question of ‘who does what’? Left unanswered, this question can lead to tension and in the worst case, undermine the product. Answering the question for your team should be less about, say, what a generic UX…

Barry Horwitz explains how to improve team communication, relationship, and productivity. Have you heard about the “Two Pizza Rule?” It was introduced by Jeff Bezos in the early days of Amazon. The idea: every internal team should be small enough that it can be fed with just two pizzas. Beyond that, Bezos believed, the group would start to become less effective. Pizza aside, there is research to back this up. The “Ringelmann Effect” suggests that the larger the group, the…

Guillermo Herbozo shares an evergreen post on improving team effectiveness.  In our quest to improve team effectiveness in a sustainable way, we have come to a seemingly obvious conclusion. There is no one stand-alone intervention for making change sustainable. Improving team performance requires a combination of efforts and interventions, as discussed on the post Coaching is critical but is not enough. What has also become clear to us is that if a team wants to obtain and sustain improvement they…

Conflict in the workplace is a common problem for all companies, however, in this article, Bernie Heine offers ways to resolve employee conflict and move it from destructive to productive.  We’re all very familiar with conflict, whether it be in our friendships, familial dynamics, or professional relationships. Conflict is a regular aspect of interpersonal relationships and, when handled productively, can lead to innovative solutions. Not being on the same wavelength with someone frequently occurs in a world of individualism and…

Stephanie Soler shares professional coaching tips on how to manage a one-on-one session that yields results. Having regular 1:1 meetings with direct reports has become standard practice for managers. In reality, the quality of these meetings vary. At their worst, 1:1s are bland status updates and a waste of time. At their best, 1:1s are powerful coaching interactions that set your direct reports up for success. There’s no single recipe for a great 1:1. Each direct report is different, and…

Jesse Jacoby takes us back to the basic, but widely overlooked and underestimated, points of communication that help build trust, ensure clear communication and win respect. We live in an age where communication is rampant. When exchanging information with a colleague, you may choose to email, text, instant message, tweet, and the list goes on. With all these choices readily available, one may argue that communicating is faster and easier than ever before. However, our messages are also becoming more…

Finding the right people to work with is difficult, so when you have a good employee, how do you ensure you keep them? Jesse Jacoby explains how to stop your talent from leaving your company. Talent flight refers to the sense of a sudden exodus of highly skilled people from the current organization. It’s not a term that employees would use of themselves. Employees would simply say that they were taking advantage of opportunities that, until now, weren’t available to…

In this article, Lars Linnekogel shares the key points of importance in the formation of a project team. In our work to date, we have been introduced to many project teams on the basis of which a project can succeed or possibly fail. The “formation of a project team” may sound simple at first, but entails a large number of important factors which must be taken into account by the project leader. This article outlines the points of importance with…

Tirrel Payton tackles the all-too-common messy problems that plague many a team and team manager.  “Our project is to implement a new widget management system”, she stated confidently. “Ok”, I said, “but what is the problem we are trying to solve?” “We need a new system…”, she reiterated. “Yea, but to what end? Whats the business goal? And how will we know when we have reached it? How will we measure success?” “Look”, she said, steeling her glance and locking…

Ben Dattner shares an article published in Harvard Business Review that reveals the source of most conflicts in the workplace.  Conflict happens everywhere, including in the workplace. When it does, it’s tempting to blame it on personalities.  But more often than not, the real underlying cause of workplace strife is the situation itself, rather than the people involved. So, why do we automatically blame our coworkers? Chalk it up to psychology and organizational politics, which cause us to oversimplify and…

In this post, Jessica Lackey identifies the five costs of misalignment and what you can do about it.  It can be easy to stay super busy by taking action in our lives and businesses. #productivity #hustleculture But if the actions we are taking are not aligned to our deepest blueprint, our inner knowing, then we aren’t truly operating in our highest gifts that will transform our revenue and results. We might be treading water, or “wasting time”, instead of being…

Amanda Setili shares a concise post on the perception of risk and how it affects the team.  Karen perceives that competitors are moving very quickly, so she feels the leadership team has no option but to be even more aggressive. Jim sees the competitors as foolhardy, so he wants to take a slow and steady path while the competition defeats themselves. Curt keeps waffling back and forth; he wants to pump up revenue growth, but consistently balks at the price…

In this article, Jared Simmons identifies the difference between intelligence and wisdom and how understanding the difference may improve talent management.  In large organizations, the nature of the work creates a natural tendency toward complexity. And as a leader, it can be very tempting to advance those who seem to have the intelligence to manage it. But complexity is not a symptom to be managed while you work–it is often the work itself. Its symptoms are a lack of a…

  Jeffery Perry shares an article that explains how to leave a leadership position in the best possible way and shape. Leavership? No, this is not a typo where the “v” is meant to be a “d.” Much has been written about business leadership—the art of guiding and motivating others to achieve a set of goals and objectives. Most business leaders are judged based on performance during their leadership roles. However, leavership is the art of personally transitioning leadership roles…

  If you have experienced great ideas die in the making and want to avoid this in the future, read on. Robyn Bolton offers a few expert tips on how to combat the problem of the ‘derailers’ in your midst. Innovating – doing something different that creates value – is hard. Innovating within a large organization can feel impossible. In my work with corporate innovators, we always start with great optimism that this time will be different, this time innovation…

  Nora Ghaoui shares an article that identifies how to read the signals that predict what people will do next.  Have you ever been in a situation where something happened, say, a relationship ended, and you thought, “I should have seen it coming”? Would you have wanted to see it earlier so you could do something about it? You can. You can see things coming by paying attention to the clues in people’s behaviour that tell you what they will…

  Discover thirteen ways to improve leadership on the shop floor in this older, but always relevant, post from John Sturdivant.  Frontline operations leaders have a tough job, and I’ve seen huge ranges in styles and effectiveness. The best leaders are caring, but know when to be tough. They have their priorities straight, and say no to everything else. They have invested time and effort into building an infrastructure for team performance. And most importantly, they have mutual trust with…

  Bernie Heine shares four tips on how to make your customer service stronger.  No matter what your business is all about, customers are always at the core of it and should be your top priority. If the majority of them are happy, you’re much more likely to build credibility and bring in more business. Some research has shown that almost 80% of the customers are very likely to recommend a company to a friend if they had a pleasant…

  David Burnie shares a post from his company blog that identifies six change management guidelines designed to help manage change effectively.  While they say that nothing in life is certain except death and taxes, this proverb is missing another of life’s key inevitabilities: change. As highlighted by the current COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the world, business and organizational change can be both planned and unplanned. Regardless of what instigates change, it must be properly managed for success. Not everyone enjoys…

  Luiz Zorzella shares an article that identifies key insights for improving a service team’s performance and results. If your firm is organized around service teams, you may find that understanding and managing their contribution is difficult. It is not easy because it depends on several logic leaps that sound intuitive but are opaque. For example, you may set goals and even reward them for keeping the clients in their portfolio happy. You may achieve this through a combination of…

  Caroline Taich can help you improve your strategic planning process by understanding what drives the differences in the team’s expectations.  Much of my work involves strategic planning. Over the years I have observed that there are different kinds of strategic plans, and different views on what constitutes an excellent plan. This can lead to trouble when it comes with a mismatch of expectations within one team. I wonder, why is there so much difference? There is probably a long…

  Diane Mulcahy recently published an article on ADP.com that explains how companies can grow their contingent workforce and why they should. Shifts in corporate supply and demand as a result of the global health event, and the halt of business travel have led to an increase in contingent workers for many companies. Independent workers give businesses more flexibility to staff up and down as the market environment changes, and to access the precise skills, expertise, and experience where and…

In this two-part series, Eric Arno Hiller interviews Spend Matters founder, Jason Busch, about the growth of the market of Product Cost Management software and the state of the art today.   A lot has happened in the world of procurement software in the last 20 years. Purchasing has added a lot of new tools to what was mostly a relationship-focused discipline. These developments include: Data-rich environments of spreadsheets, MRP and ERP systems Supply chain management and supplier relationship management…