After expending considerable effort on formulating a strategy, most executives would like to see their company’s strategic plans fully executed. Deviations from the strategic plan are often assumed to be detrimental to corporate performance. However, compliance with the strategy doesn’t…
When work is stressful, it can be difficult to disengage at the end of the day. With your mind churning, thinking about the mountain of tasks back at the office and distracted by work emails at the dinner table, it…
Executives say that they lose 40% of their strategy’s potential value to breakdowns in execution. However, this strategy-to-performance gap is rarely the result of shortcomings in implementation; it happens because the plans are flawed from the start. Too many companies…
For decades, we’ve often thought of leadership profiles in unique buckets. Two popular varieties are the ‘visionaries’ – who embrace strategy and think about amazing things to do, and the ‘operators’ – who get the stuff done. According to a…
Why are so many successful business leaders, all of a sudden, urging their companies and colleagues to make more mistakes and embrace more failures? James Quincey, CEO of Coca-Cola Co., in May called upon rank-and-file managers to go beyond the…
How can leaders help employees find meaning at work? Organizations spend considerable amount of resources on corporate value and mission statement. But even the most inspiring of these — from Volvo’s commitment to Safety to Facebook’s desire to Connect People,…
While sabbaticals are still rare in corporate America, their presence is increasing rapidly. Recent research and corporate experiments suggest that there might not be enough employees taking time off — and even if they are taking time off, they should be…
Many of us know the benefits and aim of delegation — to build teams that can share the workload so that you do the highest expression work that only you can do. But in practice, we hoard and bottleneck out…
Executives and managers invest a lot of effort and time building trust in their teams: establishing trust within their employees and ensuring that their employees trust them in return. But many employees say they do not feel trusted by their managers, and…
Studies show that bosses feel less stressed than their employees do. Bosses’ perceptions of stress are offset by factors such as status, autonomy, and job security – these are generally higher for managers than for their employees. Steve Arneson describes…