Fri, 01/20/2017 - 16:37

When we are under normal work stress i.e. trying to get things done, we act in accordance with our natural tendencies, underlying belief system and strong likes or dislikes.   So if you want to better deal with yourself, you need to surface these and make sure, in critical situations, that you deal with them more consciously and purposefully.

 

A key role that an effective managerial leader must play is the keeper of the vision.  How do you progress people effectively towards a worthwhile vision and what are some of the challenges that prevent effectiveness here?

 

Thu, 01/05/2017 - 10:21

When you are highly self aware AND you have the capability to quickly recognize scenarios where one of the ideal leadership roles fits,  your behaviors produce far more effective results…  There are several critical roles.  These are not totally mutually exclusive but the seven assist you in situationally shifting appropriately to best manage the scenario for the long term.

 

Thu, 12/29/2016 - 11:03

If you want to be a truly effective manager, you need to be able to shift roles situationally.  Some do this quite naturally and often effectively,  but most do not, at least not without a fair amount of forethought and practice (i.e. work developing new habits).   We arrive at work each day with a set of natural tendencies, attitudes, motivations, likes and dislikes that largely guide our responses. It is the strongest of these, that typically drive our behavior and to be effective, a person especially a leader needs to understand themselves and each of these areas.  Along with this,  should they have stress issues and most people do, they need to understand the impact  on their behavior of their current stress level or the likely stress level when they take action.  (Consider Paradox Theory)

 

Wed, 11/30/2016 - 14:02

When you give advice, you are typically doing what is easiest to do, to get your thoughts across and perhaps feel good about yourself.  Most of the time, you will be far more effective by situationally playing a more effective role. Indeed, you will be more effective offering your advice as constructive feedback relative to their vision of success or skills or specific role.  This is especially true if you are the manager over people  to whom you are giving this advice.

 

Fri, 03/11/2016 - 14:23

Key to this process is the accurate and insightful data that can effectively support decision-making in each of these areas:

1. Who should we be attracting?

2. Who should we hire?

3. How can we bring them up to a level of high performance rapidly?

4. How can we create a positive mutually beneficial relationship between the employee and the company?

5. How can we manage them so that they perform at a high level and as close to optimally as possible?

6. How can we best make decisions about who should do what next and deal with the what ifs so we are prepared if we lose key people for health or other reasons.

Fri, 03/11/2016 - 13:33

When you want to improve your ability to select the right people for the job, or manage them more effectively, or develop them optimally, you need to realize that decision support tools have drastically improved in the last few years.    Choosing the right employees and managing them effectively involves ongoing decisions that need to be supported with critical information.  The validated information that is now available inexpensively is a really a game changer  (in the game of management).

Read More at the Understand! Blog

Mon, 02/29/2016 - 17:08

With advances in behavioral science combined with digital technology, great improvements have recently been made in our ability to predict performance in specific jobs and with the underlying predictive data, to assist in better onboarding and managing employees.  When it comes time to acquire talent, develop talent, plan talent or build effective teams, if you're not understanding the natural tendencies, motivations, work preferences, task preferences and attitudes of your people, you are paying a big price whether you know it or not. 

 

Here are 3 Hidden Costs to consider for March:

Hiring mediocre or poor performers who don't  fit the job

Wed, 01/20/2016 - 11:39

Many organizations have failed to see the full promise of talent management systems and the two most common reasons are partial implementations and failing to integrate predictive behavioral information on each employee with their talent management processes and systems.  

 

Talent Management systems have 4 principle functions including recruiting(which supports recruiting, hiring, selection and onboarding typically), performance management, learning management and compensation and benefits management.   By integrating behavioral information including motivations, attitudes, natural tendencies, , task and work environment preferences and other pertinent data, you not only "inform" processes and decisions throughout the talent management cycle you enable optimization.  That is, you provide the key data (that is not present in these systems) to make the optimal selection decisions, to optimally manage each employee,  to select the best development path and provide information to the employee that will optimize their development experience and you can better make compensation decisions based on a knowledge of what really matters to them.

Thu, 01/07/2016 - 14:24

As we enter 2016,  you hear story after story about the internet of things, the union of ecommerce with digital intelligence, cognitive computing and the cognitive business.  Even Warren Buffet has got into the act, investing billions in IBM in the last year or so, believing in their main focus on it.  Cognitive, of course, in this sense has to do with non- humans (businesses, organizations, machines, systems… ) understanding, reasoning and learning. A key aspect of this is what  getting access to the 80% of data that is "inside".  It might be inside files that are being moved (songs, videos or used or inside "things" that is machines, buildings, control systems etc…). But it is still the case and will be for the foreseeable future that people are the most important components of an organization, so an obvious question, is - how do you get inside them?

 

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"The U.S. Department of Labor has estimated the costs to replace an employee to be approximately 1/3 their annual salary; but when you start looking at the impact of hiring the wrong employee and having to replace them, some studies say 2.5 times annual earnings, some 4 times and some even higher." AGILEdge