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A few years ago, the world's leading designer and manufacturer of office products decided that it needed an organizational overhaul. Coordination across product lines was poor. Design teams collaborated ineffectively. Key personnel were remote from customers. The company responded in part by reorganizing its work space, creating an office-free "village" where designers and architects could mingle and collaborate and customers could visit easily. Proximity does matter for promoting collaboration, and the space was conceptually compelling and visually appealing.

Zenger and Folkman admit that the flaws seem obvious ones that any leader would try to fix. But they found that ineffective leaders were often unaware of their flaws. The authors suggest that leaders need to take a hard look at themselves and should seek candid feedback on their performance. I believe that simple awareness of what constitutes effective leadership behaviors and how one is performing on them may not be adequate for improvement. In this article, I suggest an intervention that might work for you.

Specifically, I focus on the following:

The knowing-doing gap;
Closing the knowing-doing gap;
Goal-setting as a simple intervention;
The power of goal-setting;
Preventing relapse with email reminders to yourself;

To have a successful digital workplace (which I define as 'work is something you do, not a place you go to') it is vital organisations have the right strategy, culture, environment and infrastructure to exploit the benefits fully. It needs to become the natural way of working so everyone is more effective and productive and your organisation more efficient and successful.

My 'must have' principles for a great digital workplace include: Strategy: it is vital that your digital workplace strategy is aligned with your organisation's overall strategy.  There is no point planning to invest time and resources to move in one direction if your organisation is going in the opposite way. Engagement: this is needed at two levels.  Firstly with stakeholders you need to endorse your strategy.  Secondly with early adopters who will embrace enthusiastically and spread the word. Governance: a consistent, relevant and appropriate level is needed that minimises risks and enables the maximum benefits to be achieved. HR policies: policies need to encourage people to change their way of working that also benefits the organisation. IT infrastructure: people need to be confident they can use what they need for their work when they need to - simple!

Buy-In Saving Your Good Idea from Being Shot Down-by John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead So, you believe in a good idea. You're convinced it is needed badly, and needed now. But, you can't make it happen on your own. You need support in order to implement it and make things better. You or your allies present the plan. You present it well. Then, along with thoughtful issues being raised, come the confounding questions, inane comments, and verbal bullets-either directly at you or, even worse, behind your back. It matters not that the idea is needed, insightful, innovative, and logical. It matters not if the issues involved are extremely important to a business, an individual, or even a nation. The proposal is still shot down, or accepted but without sufficient support to achieve all of its true benefits, or slowly dies a sad death. What do you do? This is not a book about persuasion and communication in general, or even about all the useful methods people use to create buy-in. Instead, here we offer a single method that can be unusually powerful in building strong support for a good idea, a method that is rarely used or used well, and that does not require blinding rhetorical skills or charismatic magic. We have seen that this method of walking into the fray, showing respect for all, and using simple, clear, and common sense responses, can not only keep good ideas from getting shot down, but can actually turn attacks to your advantage in capturing busy peoples' attention, helping them grasp an idea, and ultimately building strong buy-in.

A do-ocracy (also sometimes do-opoly, which is a more obvious pun on "duopoly") is an organizational structure in which individuals choose roles and tasks for themselves and execute them. Responsibilities attach to people who do the work, rather than elected or selected officials. The term is popular with libertarian management afficionados and BurningMan participants. It also has a Zen nature that can be hard for some people to fathom. "Why is it Lion who posts so many big ideas on CommunityWiki?" "Because Lion posts so many big ideas on CommunityWiki." Doing a task is in itself justification for you being the person who does that job.

Google doesn't have business units! I knew there had to be something different and special about Google to make it the success story that it is. This is what the Googe  CFO had to say in a recent McKinsey interview: Patrick Pichette: We don't have business units. Once a company has business units, managers tend to take ownership of these units' resources. Managers have a plan, and the natural instinct is to say, "Those resources are mine and I have to fight to keep them." This is exactly the issue we regularly see in our organisational network analysis studies. We even wrote about it here in "The Tyranny of Top Down"