Category: General
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How do I know my opinion is right?
In a meritocracy, the best idea wins. So, how can we design an organization that will enable that? Ray Dalio propose to use radical transparency, radical truthfulness, and algorithmic decision-making to create the conditions where people can speak up and say what they really think. He shares an example of feedback email he receives after…
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Grow your questioning skills
We tend to want to solve the problems, even when we know that it is much better to help people to find their own solutions. I received several questions about the need to listen, and the need to ask better questions. Looking for a simple way to explain how it works, I used the GROW…
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Learning from the neuroscience of trust
Trust is the foundation of the human relationship and the foundation of an effective team. I recently shared how our behavior will create or destroy trust in the article The Evolution of Trust, and more about trust as the foundation of a team in the article The Five Dysfunction of a Team. Paul J. Zak,…
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Hierarchy and Decision Making
Erin Meyer covers how cultural differences in leadership styles create unexpected misunderstandings [Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston, and Beijing of the last issue of Harvard Business Review]. Looking at how people behave towards hierarchy is not enough to understand what kind of leadership style they will expect. A second dimension needs to be taken…
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The Advantage of a book discussion club
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business is a book by Patrick Lencioni. This one is not a business novel, like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (you may have read that previous post). The book purpose is to explain a model to bring organizational health. I will not enter into the…
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Organization Maturity Model
The publication of the Open Organization Maturity Model reminded me that we had the goal to use a similar approach. Why do we want to use a maturity model? A maturity model is, as said on Wikipedia, “a measurement of the ability of an organization for continuous improvement in a particular discipline”. So, our goal…
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The Evolution of Trust
When forming a team, or starting to work with a team, I usually start with the foundation of a team: Trust. I even used several times, the book from Patrick Lencioni: The Five Dysfunction of a Team, obviously because the “Absence of Trust” is the base of the pyramid. I remember playing 2 times, with…
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Managing Time
When I searched for “time management” on google this morning, there were 238,000,000 results. So, we could consider that it’s not necessarily useful to add one more. A quick look at the first page of results, and we can already see divergent opinions. From the rigid daily structure to the statement that time management is…
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Team Identity
The sense of belonging is an important experience to have. Belonging means that we are accepted as part of, as a member of the group, the team, the company. We want to be part of a team because what defines the team identity is appealing to us. The team is defined by its vision and…
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Town Hall Meeting
The term Town Hall Meeting is often used inside a company to characterize a meeting organized by a highly ranked executive and gathering a large part of the company employees, or even all of them. Usually, the meeting is meant to give a short status on what the executives are working on for the future…
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Why Transformation Efforts Fail?
Thanks to a push email from Harvard Business Review, and discussions around ongoing transformation efforts, I read again an old article from John Kotter: Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. The first lesson is that change is not an event, it’s a process. The second lesson is that change takes time, and not following the…
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Fight Club Retrospective
You probably remember the first 2 rules of Fight Club, right? Let’s review the rules: “Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! Third rule of Fight Club: if someone yells…