Category Archives: Organizational Effectiveness

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But What If I Can’t Delegate?

“I don’t like to micro manage,” my friend lamented. “But even when I set clear expectations and deadlines, I find myself having to guide the entire process or else the ball gets dropped. Is that an employee issue or a leadership issue?”

It’s hard enough to want to delegate in the first place. Many leaders lack trust, are insecure or are control freaks. But once you get past those barriers, what happens when your followers can’t pull their weight? Let’s talk about a few ways managers can guide their projects so that everyone can contribute.

People Consulting Plan

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How Do You Diagnose an Organization?

You’ve just been assigned to fix a problem or design a solution for an organization, department or team. Maybe you’ve been brought in as a consultant or joined a cross-functional task force. Regardless, management wants results. Where do you start?

Just like in medicine, the last thing a change practitioner should do is prescribe before diagnosing. You don’t want to “fix” the wrong problem. That usually just makes things worse and hurts your credibility.

So how do you diagnose an organization?

Stethoscope Doctor1

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What the Communist Party Got Right About Leadership

Today’s post was co-written with Brooke Steinke, a student in the Organizational & Management Communication class at CollegePlus. It was great working with you this semester, Brooke!

Three months ago, if someone had asked me what I could learn from the Communist Party, I would have jokingly replied, “How not to run a government.”

However, since then, I read Douglas Hyde’s book, Dedication and Leadership. Hyde was a news editor of the Communist newspaper London Daily Worker and outspoken Party member during and after WWII – in Great Britain no less. Finally coming to the realization that the Communist philosophy is intrinsically flawed, Hyde resigned from the Party but argued that the Communist leadership methods are, in many cases, extremely effective and worth emulating. “Never in man’s history has a small group of people set out to win the world and achieved more in less time,” he wrote. In his book, Hyde demonstrated that the techniques Communism used to create leaders and spread its influence are not “Communist” techniques at all. They are, in fact, very effective and powerful strategies anyone can use to instill dedication and leadership in others.

Communism

Here are a few of the strategies that Douglas Hyde revealed from the Communist Party:

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Which Stage of Competence Are You?

Everybody wants competence. We want it for ourselves. We expect it from others in our organizations. We demand it from the people and organizations we purchase from. But how do we figure out if we’ve got it? How well do we develop it in others? Where do we even start?

Contemplative GorillaBack in the 1970s, Gordon Training International developed a learning model called “The Four Stages of Competence,” which has also been linked to Abraham Maslow’s work. There’s something helpful about breaking an idea or a challenge down into smaller parts, and competence is no different. If we can understand which stage both we and our followers are in, we’ll be much more useful. Here are the Four Stages of Competence:

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How to Measure Learning Programs Using the Kirkpatrick Evaluation Model

All of a sudden you get put in charge of building a new training course for your organization. It could be leadership training, professional training or technical training. Doesn’t matter. So you do the hard work of analyzing the learning needs, developing objectives, designing content, coordinating the event and finally delivering the course. Mission accomplished! That is, until management asks for the evaluation results to find out what difference the course made. Now you’re just insulted. After all the hard work you put in, management thinks your course may have been a flop? The nerve!

This may be how you feel about evaluation… unless you have a built-in evaluation plan. In that case, you’ll be ready to hand over the results of your training before management even asks for it.

So how do you evaluate learning programs? In this post, I’d like to summarize the Kirkpatrick Four Levels of Learning Evaluation.

Measuring Tape

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3 Simple Ways to Determine Hiring Fit

I remember the first time I asked my supervisors if I could sit in on an interview they had scheduled with an outside candidate. I figured it would be a good learning opportunity as well as a break from crunching financial numbers. (This was during my first job out of college, before I got into leadership consulting). To my surprise, both supervisors looked at me like I had just told them aliens had arrived on our planet and wanted to tour our facilities. I went back to my desk trying to figure out what was so absurd about my request.

Sitting in on an interview might have been awkward for that role, but since then I’ve participated in many job interviews, observed the process and helped identify skills needed for future job roles. Talent acquisition can get complicated sometimes, but I constantly find myself referring back to three simple questions my friend Brad once shared with me about how to determine if a candidate is a good fit for the team. I’d like to share them with you.

Job Candidates

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The 5 SOF Truths of Leadership

When I joined the military in my early twenties, I wasn’t quite sure what “Special Operations Forces” (SOF) meant, but it didn’t take long for my new community to educate me. Some of our hardcore “green beret” colleagues operated as independent four man teams conducting unconventional warfare operations. My role in Civil Affairs had more to do with liaising with and advising local civilian leadership in foreign areas. I also didn’t get far into my initial training before I started hearing about the five “SOF Truths.” No matter what else we were training on, we always came back to them.

I immediately believed the five SOF Truths could hold up as a leadership doctrine for just about any organization, military or not. Below is my slightly amended version.

Special Forces Jumping from Plane

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Your Organization Absolutely Needs Name Tags

Name TagYou walk down the hallway at work and just as you are about to greet a co-worker, he instead stares at the floor as he passes by. Later on, you realize in a meeting that a “random” co-worker you smile at each day actually provides your most important reports. So you finally break the ice and introduce yourself. Then at a promotion reception in your honor, an old co-worker congratulates you but you can’t for the life of you remember his name. You fumble for a cliché nickname, leaving both of you embarrassed.

None if this would have happened if your organization simply had name tags.

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6 Ways to Change Your Learning Culture

When you were growing up, you probably spent hours sitting in a classroom listening to teachers deliver lecture after lecture in school. Now, as an adult employee, the thought of sitting through company training seems boring, unproductive, pointless and wasteful compared to actual work you could be doing. And if that’s what you think, your colleagues are likely thinking the same thing. The great news is that learning organizations are shifting their methods. But tactics aren’t the best place to start. They never are. First, your organization needs a new learning mindset. Here’s how you can get one.

Adult Learning ClassFollowing are six specific ways many organizations have traditionally thought about training – with a culture “shift” for each one.

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3 Things Strategic Leaders ALWAYS Do

Hopefully you’ve given significant thought to the questions “what is a leader?” and “what do leaders do?” Almost everyone has an opinion. Folks who value execution say, “leaders should drive results.” Folks who value relationships say, “Leadership should inspire others to reach their potential.” Folks who value authority say, “leaders should run a tight ship,” while folks who value team development simply say, “leaders serve.”

GPS

How do you answer the question?

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So… What Do Consultants Actually Do?

“So Nathan, tell me what you do for a living?”

“Well, I’m a consultant.”

“A consultant? But what do you actually do?”

This is a typical conversation whenever I meet anyone new – and not just me, but for most folks in my profession. I don’t know why, but it’s always been a little tricky to explain what, in fact, I do for a living. “I solve problems,” or “I help people clarify what they want,” or “I build management solutions” are typical responses. A past employer taught us to say, “I help clients move from issue to outcome, with pace, certainty and strategic agility.”

Management Consultant What People Think I Do

The truth is that I help management understand their needs and then help build solutions to meet those needs. Since my specialty is organizational and talent development, the types of needs I address are usually related to the people and leadership side of organizations. My colleagues in other specialties do the same thing, but with finance, marketing, customers, supply chains, technology or countless other areas.

Whether you are officially a “consultant” or are a specialist, program manager, project manager or just plain responsible for some type of organizational change, I’d like to introduce you to a basic consulting methodology.

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8 Critical Stages for Anyone Creating Change

It’s been said that the term “change management” is a misnomer because if you are trying to “manage” change, you’re already too far behind! Change must be led from the front. Because of that, when I first discovered John Kotter’s eight stage process for creating major change in a university textbook (and published in his international bestseller Leading Change), I knew I had stumbled onto something incredibly valuable.

Change

So how do you go about creating change in your organization? Change seems like it should be simple enough – until we experience resistence from people who want things to stay the same. What’s the solution?