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In chaotic times, an executive's instinct may be to strive for greater efficiency by tightening control. But the truth is that relinquishing authority and giving employees considerable autonomy can boost innovation and success at knowledge firms, even during crises. Our research provides hard evidence that leaders who give in to the urge to clamp down can end up doing their companies a serious disservice.

Although business thinkers have long proposed that companies can engage workers and stimulate innovation by abdicating control-establishing nonhierarchical teams that focus on various issues and allowing those teams to make most of the company's decisions-guidance on implementing such a policy is lacking. So is evidence of its consequences. Indeed, companies that actually practice abdication of control are rare. Two of them, however, compellingly demonstrate that if it's implemented properly, this counterintuitive idea can dramatically improve results.

Executives at the more highly networked companies in our survey reported that they captured a broad set of benefits from their Web investments. A key question remained, however: do these benefits translate into fundamental performance improvements, measured by self-reported market share gains and higher profits?

Scrum is a simple, team-based framework for solving complex problems. Scrum encourages common sense, direct communication and rapid self-improvement among the stakeholders. Although Scrum was originally created for software projects, nothing in Scrum is specific to software.

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;

We've kept things as simple as possible to help you find the tips you need, when you need them. The articles have been split into three main categories:

for tips to improve your personal effectiveness at work.

containing hints and tips to help you manage your team.

to develop your interpersonal, writing and presentation skills.

A Habit of Mind is knowing how to behave intelligently when you DON'T know the answer.
Employing Habits of Mind requires drawing forth certain patterns of intellectual behavior that produce powerful results. They are a composite of many skills, attitudes and proclivities including:
Value:  Choosing to employ a pattern of intellectual behaviors rather than other, less productive patterns.
Inclination:  Feeling the tendency toward employing a pattern of intellectual behaviors.
Sensitivity:  Perceiving opportunities for, and appropriateness of employing the pattern of behavior.
Capability:  Possessing the basic skills and capacities to carry through with the behaviors.
Commitment:  Constantly striving to reflect on and improve performance of the pattern of intellectual behavior.

According to last year's Learning for growth report from the CBI, more firms in 2010 (48%) than 2009 (39%) say improving leadership and management skills is a key priority for them, and this is even higher for the public sector (73%). The same report also highlights that over two thirds of organisations are looking for more targetted and cost effective routes for training. The IOD's Skills Crunch highlights a different challenge as leadership and management skills are at the top of the list for organisations reporting skills gaps in their current staff.

People can improve their innovation skills by mentally simulating the use of innovation tools.  Chip and Dan Heath in their book, Made to Stick, talk of the importance of mental simulation with problem solving as well as skill-building.

Company Overview
The Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre is a global management consultancy specialising in the benchmarking, measuring and development of creative behaviors for organizational value.

Committed to developing human capital in organizations, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre collaborates with its clients to help them realize their organizations' visions to create tangible value.

With deep expertise in management innovation and a broad global network of academics and practitioners with proven experience in consulting in this space, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre can mobilize the right people, skills, alliances to realise your organization's key drivers for success.

Using the theories of organizational economics and its own unique IP, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre benchmarks and measures the key elements of the organization's key drivers for success - its management innovation infrastructure and its creative ecology.

The overview   

Provides a holistic view of the organization as a creative system
Benchmarks the organization's management innovation capabilities and capacities in that syste
Identifies critical areas with potential for development and improvement
Recommends and delivers interventions to drive value, success and growth.

The 8 Step Process for Leading Change

30 years of research by leadership guru Dr. John Kotter have proven that 70% of all major change efforts in organizations fail. Why do they fail? Because organizations often do not take the holistic approach required to see the change through.

However, by following the 8 Step Process outlined by Professor Kotter, organizations can avoid failure and become adept at change. By improving their ability to change, organizations can increase their chances of success, both today and in the future. Without this ability to adapt continuously, organizations cannot thrive.

This question came up in an online seminar this morning. "How can I demonstrate the value of Informal Learning?"

First of all, understand that you're not buying informal learning. It's already going on in your organization. In fact, three-quarters of the learning on and about how to do one's job is informal.

The natural learning that occurs outside of classes and workshops is vital but it probably flies under your corporate radar. No manager is accountable; no department is committed to making improvements; there's no identifiable budget. Hence, one of the most important functions in an organization, keeping up with skills to prosper in the future, is left largely to chance.

Most corporate learning remains traditional, formal, and follows patterns laid down decades ago by firms such as GE and IBM. While it is hard to fault the content of these programs, as they are usually generic and seem to make sense; there is also little evidence that they make a huge difference to profits, success, or productivity. It is much easier to show that a quality program or a process improvement initiative have more impact than a learning program.

Formal classes and training programs are still the mainstay of corporate learning functions. Instructional designers and professional presenters spend thousands of hours designing training that should, in theory, transfer the needed skills to leaners as fast as possible. Unfortunately there is little evidence that these classes work very well.

Rather here's what I see: our institutions, far from evolving and improving, at the time we need to update them most, are actually moving backwards. We're taking tiny steps--and sometimes giant leaps--backwards in time, deconstructing the basic building blocks of civilization. Think I'm exaggerating? Then like most of our talking heads, pundits, and chatterati, you might need a tiny refresher course on what civilization and prosperity are yourself.

By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN

The status-update era is changing the annual performance review.


Peter and Maria Hoey
With many younger workers used to instant feedback-from text messages to Facebook and Twitter updates-annual reviews seem too few and far between. So companies are adopting quarterly, weekly or even daily feedback sessions.

Not surprisingly, Facebook Inc. exemplifies the trend. The social network's 2,000 employees are encouraged to solicit and give small nuggets of feedback regularly, after meetings, presentations and projects. "You don't have to schedule time with someone. It's a 45-second conversation-'How did that go? What could be done better?" says Lori Goler, the Palo Alto, Calif., social-networking company's vice president of human resources. More formal reviews happen twice a year.

For most companies, employee reviews are still an annual rite of passage. Some 51% of companies conduct formal performance reviews annually, while 41% of firms do semi-annual appraisals, according to a 2011 survey of 500 companies by the Corporate Executive Board Co., a research and advisory firm.

And increasing frequency may not make much of a difference if the performance appraisals are ineffective to begin with, say some. One academic review of more than 600 employee-feedback studies found that two-thirds of appraisals had zero or even negative effects on employee performance after the feedback was given. "Why is doing something stupid more often better than doing something stupid once a year?" asks Samuel A. Culbert, a professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles and the co-author of the book "Get Rid of the Performance Review!"

Some firms have found that the traditional once-a-year review is so flooded with information-appraising past performance, setting future goals, discussing pay-that workers have trouble absorbing it all, and inst

Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the (In)Formal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results, by Jon R. Katzenbach, a senior partner at Booz & Company, which publishes strategy+business, and Zia Khan, vice president for strategy and evaluation at the Rockefeller Foundation. They take a much more fine-grained approach to managing that is based on finding the right combination of the "logic of the formal" and the "magic of the informal."

In the three-part book, the authors focus on how individual managers can use informal connections and conversations to enhance the formal incentives and structures of a company - and, in the process, motivate individual performance and mobilize organizational change. Managers who can draw on both the formal and the informal as required have a high "organizational quotient" (OQ). This is a combination of intelligence quotient (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ) that balances disciplined and spontaneous actions, and rational and emotional thinking, depending on the demands of the situation.

The objective is consilience, which literally means a jumping together of the formal and the informal, a creative integration of "both...and" that harks back to Mary Parker Follett, the early-20th-century pioneer of organizational theory. This is the first of several evocative metaphors that the authors use to describe one of the most desirable but elusive phenomena in organizational life - those times when decisions, actions, and emotions jibe with strategic intent, when dynamic routines are constantly being improved upon, when employees are proud of their company, and when the company as well as the members of its ecosystem (partners, suppliers, and customers) all succeed.

Katzenbach and Khan stress that a managerial focus on the informal is not just a matter of being nice. People work and perform much better when they are treated with care and respect as individuals. The c

important: management practice

Getting Things Done workflow map

GTD Workflow Map large size

The Gore model changes the traditional role of the leader. The leader's job is to make sure the culture is healthy: Is it working as a system? Are teams coming together? Are we getting diverse points of view? Are the best ideas rising to the surface? Our leaders have to be comfortable with not being at the center of all the action, with not trying to drive every decision, with not being the most strategic person on the team or the one with the most thoughtful ideas. Their contribution is to help the organization scale and be effective.

IN medicine, the evidence-based movement arose in response to thousands of deaths and billions of wasted dollars that could have been averted by applying proven practices. Similarly, in other fields, the growing pile of studies on the human and financial costs of employee disengagement, management distrust, poor group dynamics, faulty incentive schemes and other preventable damage suggests a need for an evidence-based management movement. Some organizations are leading the way. It's time for many more to follow suit.