With the holiday celebrations now at an end, many of us are returning to our usual daily grind refreshed, rejuvenated and ready to dive into the tasks awaiting our attention. The start of a new year is also a time when many of us make resolutions of what we’d like to accomplish over the next 365 days, and possibly beyond.

Granted, it’s only natural that we’d be motivated right now to create these lists of goals, as the start of a new year often inspires that feeling of a new start; that the turning to a fresh page instills hope for new opportunities and bright possibilities for our future. The buoyant positivity around this time of the year can certainly be quite beneficial as it encourages us to take time for some personal self-reflection, pushing us to define goals of what we’d like to change in ourselves, and what areas of knowledge and understanding we’d like to develop a greater awareness of.

Of course, in order for us to truly reap the benefits of this exercise, we need to review the events of the previous year; of taking note of what we endured, learned and gained from those past experiences which can serve as the foundation that we build upon as we move forward.

Another point to consider when developing these lists of goals is how the focus doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to ourselves. Indeed, the start of a new year is a perfect opportunity for leaders to evaluate how they can help their employees with achieving their professional goals for this year.

Now, before the cynic within all of us dismisses such notions as being the result of an euphoric haze that often comes with celebrating the arrival of a new year, let us consider one of the lessons we learned over the course of the previous one. Namely, how Click here to continue reading »”4 New Year’s Resolutions To Help Your Organization Succeed This Year”

As we slowly make our way through the remaining weeks of the year, many organizations are now shifting their focus to an exercise that is often met with disdain and apprehension – the annual performance review. Regardless of whether you’re on the receiving or giving end, most of us tend to view these feedback exercises as unconstructive or a waste of time, in large part because we approach the conversation from the wrong vantage point. Participating at a recent awards gala for one of the regional high schools helped to not only shed some light on this issue, but also on how leaders can make the act of giving feedback to others more instructive and beneficial.

I was invited by the school principal to give a speech and help present awards as part of a ceremony to recognize students who had maintained a high academic standing throughout the previous school year. Although I was honoured and delighted to take part, I have to admit that I did feel some hesitation because I wasn’t an active member of this community when these students achieved these accomplishments. As such, I felt that any recognition on my part of their efforts wouldn’t exactly carry much weight because of that lack of connection.

So I decided to take another approach to my involvement where I used my role in this ceremony to serve as a source of encouragement and support for how these students could build on and attain a similar achievement over the course of the current academic year.

Following the ceremony, I was pleasantly surprised to hear from both the parents and the students of how much they appreciated my participation, and in particular the ideas I had shared in my speech and in the brief comments made to every student as they came up on stage to accept their award.

What I began to realize is that Click here to continue reading »”Are You Following These 3 Rules For Giving Effective Feedback?”

A few weeks ago, one of my readers left a comment on my blog asking why are there so many silos present in today’s organizations. Since replying to my reader’s query, I thought this would be a good topic to address as a follow-up to my previous piece where I shared a number of actionable steps organizations can implement to garner greater success from their collective efforts.

Now before I discuss how leaders can break down various internal silos that might be present in their organizations, let’s first look at why these silos are created in the first place.

Essentially, internal silos are created out of fear that if a mistake is found or some form of failure is encountered, the organization’s leadership will be interested primarily in finding someone to take the blame. As such, the various teams will isolate themselves to ensure they won’t get lumped with those who are within the leadership’s current focus of finger-pointing and blame.

The other reason silos take hold in organizations is because of that desire we all have to maintain a sense of familiarity; a ‘comfort zone’ that serves to provide feelings of order and consistency in the face of today’s fast-paced and ever-changing marketplace.

Within teams or departments, there is a given set of informal rules, a ‘way of doing things’ that creates this comfort zone because of its relative predictability. When teams have to co-ordinate with other teams or divisions, they find Click here to continue reading »”5 Strategies To Free Your Team From Organizational Silos”

With the month of September now underway, there’s an unmistakable feeling of renewed energy and determination in the air. As children return back to their school routines and the summer break now nothing more than a fond memory, perhaps it’s only natural that there’s this collective drive to take on the challenges before us with spirited enthusiasm.

Of course, how organizations view challenges – either as an outcome of being in competition with others or as an opportunity to push themselves further in order to move one step closer to reaching their full potential – plays a key role in how they approach not only overcoming these obstacles, but the level of creativity and innovation they foster within their workforce.

With this in mind, here are four steps leaders can use to ensure their organizations are not simply reacting to what challenges come their way, but that they have a clear understanding of what their organization needs to do to succeed:

1. Set clear goals independent of what your competition is doing
When it comes to the ability to consistently surprise, delight, and transform customers into loyal advocates, there are few companies that succeed at this as well as Zappos and Apple. Their ability to “deliver happiness” and release unexpected ‘must-have’ technologies respectively, are clearly not mere responses to the challenges they incur from their competition. Instead, these measures are a result of addressing what goals they have for their organization, of what they wanted to create or accomplish that would make them stand out and succeed in their respective fields.

Take Apple, for instance. Can anyone say the iPod, iPhone and iPad were created in response to something their competition was doing? Or were they more in Click here to continue reading »”Are You Using These 4 Steps For Organizational Success?”