The fact is that emotions do play a role in business and to ignore them is a sure-fire way to ensure a “car wreck” between individuals and teams. Communication, empathy, situational awareness, and self-awareness are just a few of the skills that must continually be nurtured to create high-functioning teams. An understanding of various forms of cognitive bias is also important.

The practice of giving will create a deep well of experiences that you’ll be able to tap into to bring the emotion of gratitude into the foreground. When you’re grateful, the emotions of anger, resentment, and jealousy have less room to cloud your mind. Perspective and balance become easier to achieve and maintain. The path back to balance after unexpected shocks and change events also becomes more straightforward.

At the core of the “to work from home or not to work from home” debate is the balancing act between organizational trust and accountability. In my opinion, to tell an employee explicitly (or implicitly) that the only way to confirm their productivity is if the manager can directly witness their work in an office setting is to tell that employee that they are not to be trusted.

This past Thursday, we launched our six part series, “Nobody Wants to Think Anymore” with a kickoff episode featuring my co-host, Dan Strafford. In this series, we’ll be interviewing business leaders from various industries for practical advice on what critical thinking means to them, how critical thinking is applied within their sphere of influence, and what it takes to build critical thinking skills.

You can’t help improve that which you cannot see. You can’t hold an individual or team accountable for that which is not measured. Visually showing the blinking red or amber lights in addition to the green ones in your department lets others in the organization see that your part of the company is not perfect. Adopting and weaving visual management systems into the flow of work is an important tool to show that it is not only acceptable, but expected, that we all work together to improve upon organizational challenges.

Today's brief message is a plea for humanity, balance, and healing in the wake of last Saturday's mass shooting in Buffalo, NY.

Progress is to be found through #diversity, #equity, #inclusion, and #education.

Grace. Dignity. Compassion.

Andy

A gemba walk is an opportunity for leadership to see how work is accomplished with their own eyes, listen carefully to the challenges and opportunities the team faces, and ask questions with the intention to seek to understand challenges and opportunities so they can be an advocate for and supporter of the team or department.

My goal in introducing the eight wastes of Lean and the two additional wastes of emotion and meetings is more about developing the ability to see wastes clearly than it is about properly classifying them. As the saying goes, “What gets measured gets managed.” This ability to see waste is key to the adoption of a continuous improvement mindset. After all, if we can’t see waste and inefficiency, how can we continually improve our standard work?

Trust builds when actions are aligned with words. Flow is maximized when work is aligned up, down, and across the organization. Accountability flourishes in an environment of strong communication and multidirectional transparency. The three are inextricably linked, and strong goal-setting practices serve as the foundation for establishing trust, accountability, and flow.

Welcome to my first YouTube video! In this extended introductory segment, I provide a bit of insight into my background through several "icebreaker" questions and also delve into what makes me tick as a leader.

I discuss critical skills of the future and outline the importance of adopting a lifelong learning mindset and striking the appropriate balance between behavioral and technical skills.

Finally, I read a brief excerpt from my book, Balancing Act (Kaplan Publishing, 2021).

Thank you for your time.

Goal setting within a business can be fraught with start-stops, discontinuity, extra-processing, and long wait times from ideation to implementation. Poorly designed goals that do not connect up, down, and across an organization can do more harm than good. That harm evidences itself in the form of team mistrust, employee dissatisfaction, failed projects, and poor performance. Moreover, if corporate goals change too frequently, the organizational change management curve and many individual contributor change management curves can’t keep up, leading to–you guessed it–team mistrust, employee dissatisfaction, failed projects, and poor performance.

By being clear about what the company does and its differentiator(s), the average individual change management curve gets shorter and individual morale/competence improves–all else the same. Since the average individual curve shortens and individual outcomes improve, the organizational change curve (aggregated curve) gets shorter and overall outcomes improve.