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[post_content] => Previously a lecturer in Psychology at Pembroke College, Oxford, he has been Professor of Psychology at University College London since 1992. He has lectured widely abroad and held scholarships and visiting professorships at, amongst others, the University of New South Wales, the University of the West Indies, the University of Hong Kong and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has also been a Visiting Professor of Management at Henley Management College. He has recently been made Adjunct Professor of Management at the Norwegian School of Management. Since 2007 he has been nominated by HR magazine as one of the 20 Most Influential People in HR.
IMI: Based on your current work – if you only had 6 words of advice to give a business – what would they be?
AF: Every Disruption involves threat and opportunity.
IMI: What does that mean?
AF: We live in turbulent times: times of both threat and opportunity that really test managers. So what are the fundamental principles of good management to ensure staff are happy, motivated and productive? Can you teach experts to become good people managers and if so, how? What is the role of money in motivation? And how can we engage rather than disenchant our staff? We know from futurologists that the world of work is changing fast, even though many predictions have not come true. But where we work, for whom we work and with whom we work are all in flux. How do you manage the older worker? What are young people really like in the work-place? What is the work-place and organisation of the (near) future going to look like? Finally, I address the (continual) management of change. Which strategies work best and why? No one ever said managing people was easy: but we can learn to do it better and ensure our organisation thrives and survives in an uncertain world.
Adrian Furnham is a keynote speaker at the IMI National Management Conference taking place on Thursday 29th of September. To register please click here.
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[post_date] => 2016-09-20 14:18:38
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[post_content] => Sydney Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Leadership at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, where he teaches courses on Leadership and Strategy. He is also the Faculty Director of the flagship Tuck Executive Program, and has experience working with executives at a number of other prestigious universities around the world. His latest
bestselling book is SUPERBOSSES: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent. He will be a keynote speaker at the IMI National Management Conference on 29th September 2016.
IMI: Based on your current work – if you only had 6 words of advice to give a business – what would they be?
SF: Great leaders create other great leaders.
IMI: What does this mean?
SF: Imagine a world where the work you did really mattered. Where the person who you call your boss changed your life by helping you accomplish more than you ever thought possible. Where your own opportunities would multiply in ways you may have been afraid to even dream of. That’s the world of “superbosses”, leaders with an incredible track record of generating world-class talent time and again. By systematically studying business legends and pop culture icons like Lorne Michaels, Ralph Lauren, George Lucas, Larry Ellison, Miles Davis, Charlie Mayfield, and Alice Waters, what superbosses actually do comes into focus. And anyone can do these same things. Superbosses identify, motivate, coach and leverage others in remarkably consistent, yet highly unconventional and unmistakably powerful ways. Superbosses aren’t like most bosses; they follow a playbook all their own. They are unusually intense and passionate — eating, sleeping, and breathing their businesses and inspiring others to do the same. They look fearlessly in unusual places for talent and interview them in colorful ways. They create impossibly high work standards that push protégées to their limits. They partake in an almost inexplicable form of mentoring, one that occurs spontaneously and with no clear rules. They lavish responsibility on inexperienced protégées, taking risks that seem scary and foolish to outsiders. When the time is right superbosses may even encourage star talent to leave so they can then become part of a strategic network of acolytes in the industry.
IMI: Where should we look for further information?
SF: I put together a list of interesting articles related to this subject:
Superbosses aren't afraid to delegate their biggest decisionsThe rise of the superbossesGeorge Lucas: Management Guru?The Power of Feeling UnthreatenedHire People and Get Out of the WaySydney Finkelstein is a keynote speaker at the IMI National Management Conference taking place on Thursday 29th of September. To register for this event, please click here.
[post_title] => "Great leaders create other great leaders" Six Word Wisdom from Sydney Finkelstein
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Yves Morieux is a Senior Partner and Managing Director at The Boston Consulting Group, a BCG fellow and director of the BCG Institute for Organisation.Yves' Six Simple Rules of Smart Simplicity, has helped CEOs with their most critical challenges, for instance, moving their companies from quasi bankruptcy to industry leadership.He will be a keynote speaker at the IMI National Management Conference on 8 October 2015.
1. What is the chief thing that managers/leaders get wrong about what effective leadership means today, in your experience?
Managers often don't understand what their teams really do. They understand the structures, the processes, the systems. But this is not what people do – it is what people are supposed to do. A company's performance or a department's performance is what it is because people do what they do, because of their actions, decisions and interactions – their "behaviours". Because we don't understand what people do, we create solutions – new structures, processes, systems, scorecards, incentives, training, and communication – that don't address the root causes.
We don't solve the problem, we simply add more internal complicatedness. And the more complicatedness we create, the less we understand what is really happening, the thicker the smoke screen, and then the more rules we add. This is the vicious circle of modern management. This is why the first rule of what I call Smart Simplicity is "understand what people really do at work."
2. Do leadership principles work best when understood as a top-down process, or is this understanding of leadership out of touch with the modern workplace?
From collaboration to performance to employee engagement, everything we know about work is changing – but our businesses are seemingly slow to respond. People are more attuned to sharing posts, writing blogs, and providing instant feedback through ‘likes’ and ‘favourites’ than they are to completing surveys, so why does our approach to employee engagement still centre on a set of fixed statements and a rating scale?
In their personal lives people collaborate naturally with those around them and have an amazing propensity to share even when there is no immediate benefit to them, hence the success of crowdsourcing sites like Wikipedia. So, why do we spend so much time and energy in organisations on encouraging people to practice these seemingly natural behaviours at work?
The challenge for businesses is to disrupt every process and practice in the organisation by asking: Why does it exist? What are we trying to achieve? If we were to start the organisation from scratch, would we choose to create this? And perhaps most tellingly of all, would this practice exist if we trusted our employees?
3. A core feature of your approach to leadership and better workplace productivity is the concept of ‘Smart Simplicity’. How does this play out in a world where the data available to companies now – be it through consumer feedback, predictive modelling, data analytics etc – has surged? Does the effective use of all of this data necessitate more complexity, rather than simplicity?
The environment is more complex – the problems to resolve in order to attract and retain customers, in order to create value and build competitive advantage – are more demanding than in the past. This is a fact of life. Based on our analysis, complexity has been multiplied by 6 over the last 60 years.
The real problem is not business complexity. The real problem is internal complicatedness – the solutions companies typically use to try to respond to this complexity: a proliferation of cumbersome structures, interfaces, coordination bodies and committees, procedures, rules, metrics, key performance indicators and scorecards. Based on our analysis this complicatedness has been multiplied by 35! This complicatedness creates obstacles to productivity and innovation.
People spend their time writing reports, in meetings. There is more and more work on work, and less and less work! A lot of data, a lot of information is always good. The difficulty – and the value-added – is sense-making, to derive meaning and knowledge from the data, so that companies can interpret and act on the data. But complicatedness makes it increasingly difficult for companies to make sense of the data. There is at the same time a data indigestion and a knowledge deprivation.
4. When it comes to Irish businesses, how do their workplace dynamics compare with other countries and what would be your principal advice to them on what to change?
Irish businesses face the same problems as other mature economies. They need to manage the new business complexity without getting complicated. Smart Simplicity is not about becoming simplistic, we cannot ignore the new complexity of business. This is why I refer to "Smart" simplicity. The six rules of Smart Simplicity concern Irish businesses because Irish businesses are also confronted to a greater complexity.
5. Should business leaders focus more on improving employee productivity per se, or should this be balanced with also ensuring that staff are happy at what they do and not afraid to be creative? How does one strike an effective balance?
We must not strike a balance here! We must break the compromise between productivity and happiness or creativity. We must not improve one at the expense of the other. In fact organizational complicatedness hinders productivity while demotivating people and making them suffer at work. They lose direction, purpose and meaning in the labyrinth. They have to work longer and longer, harder and harder, but on less and less value-adding activities.
This is why Smart Simplicity and removing complicatedness simultaneously increases performance and satisfaction at work: because you remove the root-cause common obstacles that hinder both.
6. What do you think are the key organisational challenges that face a country like Ireland over the next few years, for both business managers/leaders and their staff?
Organizations are going through a deep revolution in their ways of working. We are going through a new economic revolution, and every economic revolution entails and organizational revolution. The organizational solutions on which we have built profitable growth over the last 30 years are obsolete. Irish managers and employees will have to invent new ways of working.
Smart Simplicity provides guidelines for this, but what mainly matters is boldness and courage in breaking with conventional wisdom. Irish people are certainly well placed in this respect!
Yves Morieux is a keynote speaker at the IMI National Management Conference taking place on Thursday 8 October. Apologies but this event has now reached maximum capacity.
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Dymphna Ormond
30th Mar 2017
Dymphna Ormond is an IMI associate who teaches on Front Line Management and Essential Skills of Management programmes.
Related Articles
"Every Disruption involves threat and opportunity" Six Word Wisdom from Adrian Furnham
"Great leaders create other great leaders" Six Word Wisdom from Sydney Finkelstein
"Understand what people do at work" Six Word Wisdom from Yves Morieux
5 Tips for Motivating Employees
People have different interests, strengths, skills, needs, desires and behavioural characteristics.
A common question I am asked is “How do I motivate my team?” I usually respond, “You don’t. However what you can do is create the right environment, the right factors, and opportunities that will motivate each of your team members to give their best.”
Every person on your team is different. They have different interests, strengths, skills, needs, desires and behavioural characteristics. Different work will energise different people. By building a relationship that is based on trust, respect and a belief in each person, you will be able to gather information to help you answer the above question. The information you learn will help you to:
Agree on objectives that will give each person a sense of achievement from their work and opportunities to learn and further develop their strengths. Studies from Gallup (Rath, 2007) indicate that individuals who do have the opportunity to focus on their strengths every day are six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs. Their studies also suggests that when a manager focuses on an individual’s strengths the chances of them being disengaged is 1%.
Delegate interesting, meaningful and challenging work appropriately to your team members. The work you delegate should create the right opportunities for growth, learning and development and advancement. Be there to support, encourage and coach your team member. People want to feel that they are making a contribution that there is a purpose behind what they are doing.
Take a genuine interest in them as a person, their career aspirations/path feedback and work-life balance. Work with them to identify steps and actions that they can take to move them along their desired career path while achieving their desired work-life balance.
Give recognition and feedback in a way that acknowledges their strengths, skills and that they are valued. Help them to feel that they are making progress. Too many managers focus on weakness’s rather than strengths. Gallup research (Rath, 2007) has shown that when a manager focuses on an individual’s weakness’s the chances of them being disengaged is 22%. However, this is better than when a manager primarily ignores a team member when the chances of that person being disengaged is 40%. Therefore, do not ignore your good or high performing team members.
Empower your team members. Share your vision for the team and what is expected of each person clearly and precisely and ask them for their ideas, input, feedback. Genuinely listen to them. If your team know, are bought into your vision and know clearly what is expected of them i.e. a detailed understanding of what they are supposed to do, how that fits in with what everyone else is supposed to do and how those expectations change when circumstances change (Wagner & Harter, 2006) they will be more creative. Help each team member to feel that their opinions count. Explore their input with them openly, act on it and implement where appropriate
What about pay? In Dan Pink’s YouTube video “The surprising truth about what motivates” he says that you need to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table and that for complex tasks we are more motivated by mastery, autonomy, and purpose.
Have the right conversations with each person in your team. It will provide you with the information and answers to create an engaging and motivating workplace for every individual. Challenge yourself to build these relationships, to have a genuine interest in each person and their growth and development, set yourself objectives to create a motivating environment and measure your progress through your team’s engagement and results, look for feedback and ideas from your team to help you with this.
References
Rath, T. (2007). Strengths Finder 2.0. New York: Gallup Press.
Wagner, R., & Harter, J. K. (2006). 12 The Elements of Great Managing. New York: Gallup Press.
Dymphna Ormond is an IMI associate who teaches on Front Line Management and Essential Skills of Management programmes. Dymphna has over 14 years of experience designing and delivering training that engages, challenges and stimulates the thinking of participants. Her areas of expertise and interest are in employee engagement, leadership and management skills, presenting and communicating with impact.
Yves Morieux is a keynote speaker at the 
