Group items tagged

Organizational Silos

Govindarajan recommends focusing on innovation as necessary for survival, convincing employees to work together for a common goal and creating an innovation agenda around which all employees can coalesce. A committee charged with breaking up the silos can develop practices that require communication and collaboration. Increased communication from management and among employers will increase trust and begin to solve the problems.

BMW and Toyota have collaborated in the area of sharing costs and knowledge for electric car battery research, despite the fact that both compete in the luxury car segment. In fact, they have a history of collaborating with each other.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded a collaborative research consortium comprised of investigators around the world in order to speed up HIV vaccine development.

Be clear about what you are collaborating on. Set boundaries for collaboration at the beginning.Have a limited and well-defined purpose for the collaboration.Be clear about use and ownership of existing and jointly-created intellectual property.Depending on the situation, you may need to involve legal counsel. Collaborating with other firms, even competitors, may be what is needed to help both parties advance and improve. Be open to the possibilities, yet clear about the boundaries.

And as Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad says “Marketing is the price you pay for being unremarkable”. What is necessary is to define what will be the key focus of the company and what it should be renowned for e.g. how should the intended customer experience look and feel like. Unless you do that there won’t be enough of a common ground to smash the silo thinking and deliver a consistent and deliberate customer experience. Take for example the way Paul O’Neill made the turnaround in Alcoa (the biggest aluminium producer in the US, manufacturing everything from the metal for the Coca Cola cans to bolts that hold satellites) as presented in Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit”.

Silos allow staff to specialize in their unique talents, give them accountability, and provide clarity about tasks that need to be accomplished. “When we start talk about silos, it goes immediately to the negative,” Clancy says. “It's important for leaders to talk about what silos add. They do have a place in organizations to allow for focus on what you're responsible for, moving things forward and getting jobs done. To a certain degree, they are a necessary requirement to getting work done.” Of course, the problems begin when the intensity of organizational silos shifts to the extreme, and inefficiencies and animosity bubble to the surface. Fortunately, there are many ways to break down silos. It's an ongoing process, and nonprofits are continually striving to improve the way people interact with one another.

Online discussion forums and bulletin boards provide a means to share our ideas in a format that is not constrained by time, that saves all our thoughts, and that allows students to return to their contributions and even change them once they’ve read others’ posts.

I cannot imagine returning to a non-collaborative environment. I find that everyone learns so much more this way.

The technologies of online learning serve many purposes for me. My main loves are the organization of the material, the easy access to web-based tools, and the ability to building bridges for collaborative learning.

In Axonify’s platform, assessment and training are directly tied together. Because many employees use Axonify regularly, the platform is able to constantly track employee knowledge and intelligently provide the information needed to close an employee’s individual knowledge gap, says Leaman. The app also leverages learning research to optimize retention by repeating the questions in specific time intervals. Even after an employee “graduates” out of a specific topic, the questions will still be revisited about seven months later to help lock in the knowledge.

Tin Can, on the other hand allows companies and employees to record more common learning events: attending a session at a conference, say, or researching and writing a company blog post. “Companies are starting to recognize how employees actually learn and allowing them to do it the way they wish to, rather than forcing them into a draconian system,” Martin says.

more open environments.

Will websites die in the next 10 years? No, websites are not at risk of being phased out, but of course they will evolve, function, and look different than they do today. Social media platforms and mobile will become even more prevalent (including ones that we don’t even know about yet) and nonprofit leaders must carve out time to understand these trends and act now to remain relevant with their base of supporters.

Make your website, signup forms, and donation forms mobile responsive.

Update Your Nonprofit’s Facebook page a few times a day.

most managers are cooperative, friendly, and willing to share information — but what they lack is the ability and flexibility to align their goals and resources with others in real time. Sometimes this starts at the top of the organization when senior leaders don’t fully synchronize their strategies and performance measures with each other.

First, consider the goal you’re trying to achieve. Map out the end-to-end work that you think will be needed to get the outcome you want.

Second, convene a working session with all of the required collaborators from different areas of the company to review, revise, and make commitments to this collaboration contract.

the single most important factor behind all successful collaborations is trust-based relationships among participants. Many collaborative efforts ultimately fail to reach their full potential because they lack a strong relational foundation.

Trust not control

network entrepreneurs focus on creating authentic relationships and building deep trust from the bottom up. This focus on relationship-building costs relatively little yet ultimately makes a tremendous difference in impact. Network entrepreneurs ensure that the power of others grows while their own power fades, thereby developing capacity in the field and a culture of distributed leadership that dramatically increases the collaboration’s efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability.

We become indispensable and invaluable to our organization because what we provide goes so far beyond bullet points or a job description or a job title,” Rao said. “When nobody does what you do in the way you do it … the competition and all the standard metrics by which you’re typically measured no longer matter, because the factors that distinguish your work are so personal that nothing or nobody can replicate it. You’re not the best at what you do, you’re the only.”

Don't dismiss delegation as an outmoded concept that's part of the "command-and-control" model of years past. You may not believe in rigid, hierarchical organizations. But even the founders of flatter, more collaborative young businesses must ensure that every employee can acquire higher-level skills and duties.

Delegation is not task assignment. You're not simply assigning work to employees that falls within their job duties and responsibilities. To delegate, you must give someone the responsibility and authority to do something that's normally part of your jo

Delegation involves three elements: responsibility authority accountability

5 – THE EMERGING GIG ECONOMY The emerging Gig Economy means that there is no longer such a thing a job for life.-  in fact, for most individuals this means they are going to have a life of jobs. One estimate is that current students will have more than 10 jobs by the time they are 38. Companies are also going to be seeing a growing contingent workforce (made up of freelancers, independent professionals and temporary contract workers). Research from Ernst and Young shows that two in five organisations expect to increase their use of the contingent workforce by 2020. This means that people are going to be recruited WITH the skills to do a job; not recruited AND THEN trained to do the job. So if employees want to stay in a company they will therefore need to keep their skills up to date themselves. But in fact, supporting individuals to do just this will actually be beneficial to the organisation as it will reduce the costs of recruitment, So this means helping individuals organize and manage their own professional self-development inline with organizational objectives to achieve a  new level of performance.

Corporations are interested in making skilled volunteering a larger piece of their community involvement activities, and companies like Microsoft, HP, American Express and The Gap are publically and actively building more skills-based and pro bono volunteering programs.

The skilled volunteering movement is also growing among individuals – organizations like Taproot Foundation and Catchafire have joined VolunteerMatch to connect skilled volunteers directly with nonprofit projects, and they are growing by leaps and bounds.

standardized taxonomy of skills that volunteers possess and that nonprofits search for.

Date: August 21, 2017Author: tmiket 3 Comments If you know me, at some point you’ve heard me talk about working smarter instead of harder. In all the years I’ve been talking about that I’ve never had anyone disagree. Yet, far too often when the conversation progresses to exploring new ways of working I hit the “I don’t have time for that.” objection. Or “We can’t do that here.” Or “I would love to do that but our people would never go for that.” Or a bunch of others that you’ve probably heard yourself. Don’t fall into that trap if you want to be a valued contributor to your organization. To steal a term from Jane Bozarth, be a “Positive Deviant”. “While there are individual positive deviants who work alone, a key factor is working with the community to surface, spread, and sustain solutions rather than try to force outside-in answers—as is so often the case with training. … Leveraging social tools and workplace communities, and encouraging people to show their work, can help to surface and spread solutions and to sustain application of new learning to the workplace” Anyone, anwhere can surface, spread, and sustain learning in the workplace.

One of the devastating weaknesses of university learning, of the store of knowledge and opinion that has been handed down through academic training, has been its almost total erasure of women’s experience and thought from the curriculum… What you can learn [in college] is how men have perceived and organized their experience, their history, their ideas of social relationships, good and evil, sickness and health, etc. When you read or hear about “great issues,” “major texts,” “the mainstream of Western thought,” you are hearing about what men, above all white men, in their male subjectivity, have decided is important. And yet Rich is careful to counter any misperception that taking

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work. It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”

Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions