In the last 20 years, organizations have become massively more complex. Driven by globalization and enabled by information technology they operate in multiple cultures, locations and across timezones with highly diverse sets of employees. Matrix & virtual organizations are common with multiple reporting lines and competing priorities.
Yet our expectations of leadership have barely changed.
CEO magazine article on how to save a day a week by cutting our unecessary work. (pdf download)
Why teamwork should not be the "sacred cow" that it is in many organizations - and some faster alternatives. (2MB pdf download)
Kevan Hall argues that true values are deeply held and resistant to change, that companies waste time trying to change values and that they should focus on some simpler shared practices instead
More companies are using remote and virtual teams to get things done,. Margaret Kubicek looks at the people development challenges they face along the way.
How old fashioned thinking about cooperation, communication, control and community can be barriers to high performance, and what to do about it.
How to break out of the damaging cycle of micromanagement and low people expectations, get more done and improve job satisfaction. (3MB pdf download)
Too much teamwork makes companies slow and expensive to run, find out why and what you can do about it. (1.8MB pdf download)
Listen to Kevan Hall being interviewed on Creating Corporate Speed by the American Management Association in their innovative thinkers podcast series
Sunscribe to Kevan's Life in a Matrix podcast series here or go to iTunes and search on "Life in a Matrix"
An article on creating alignment in complex organization structures. This article is from our regular "tips and updates" series, sign up to receive future editions here
How can you make your meetings more interactive, engaging and valuable to the participants (1.8MB download)
Time to cut back on cooperation, communication, control and community so we can all get some work done. HR Management International Digest
By wasting less time on unnecessary cooperation, communication and central control organizations can deliver faster, reduce costs and improve job satisfaction (2.4MB pdf download)
In complex companies we have to get things done without traditional line management or other forms of authority.
Influence without authority is very simple in theory but very challenging in practice, there are three key steps.
Making your matrix work is nothing to do with the lines on the organization chart - and everything to do with how your people operate within the structure.
See our top 3 tips here
See how lack of communication is a problem of the past, and what to do to slow the avalanche of unnecessary messages
For many of us the year end meeting is one of the few opportunities to get face to face with our colleagues.
If you are involved in one of these meetings here are 3 things to avoid and 3 things to aim for to make your meeting a success
Even great teams slow down when team members are in different locations and work together mainly through conference calls and other communication technology.
Find out why and what to do about it
“Success can make you slow,” says Kevan Hall, author of Speed Lead – Faster, simpler ways to manage people, projects and teams in complex companies”.
”Great companies grow; they develop more sophisticated products, attract diverse people and build complicated organization structures – but this complexity eventually makes them slower, more expensive to run and less satisfying to work for.”
It does not have to be like this
The average FSTE 100 Company employs 2,300 people full time to do nothing else but sit in unnecessary meetings. These meetings are just part of an epidemic of cooperation that is making large companies slow and expensive to run.
How can you be an effective global leader when your followers around the world have very different expectations in the leadership style they prefer?
Time to pay less attention to the leaders and more to the style of “Followship” we need.
We have high expectations of our managers. Read any management book or attend a training program, you will see lists of criteria and skills that make managers look like superheroes. But are these expectations both out of date and actually damaging people development?
Nearly every business and team problem is put down to a “lack of communication”.
In complex companies the problem is likely to be too much communication, not too little.
Read our tips on what to do about it.
IT professionals are often first in line when companies start to integrate their international business operations or move work overseas, and this is not always a comfortable place to be!
A well run "kick-off" can speed up the delivery of your international team or project by 25% or more. Learn why and how in our latest article.
Do you ever take part in international meetings where people say “yes” when they mean “no”? Where you thought you made a decision but nothing happened after the meeting? Cultural differences may be part of the problem.
Do your team members call you every day for advice, answers to problems or support? It is nice to be popular but this may be a sign that you have not given your people the information, confidence, skills or authority to deal with problems for themselves.
How can we recreate those "water-cooler moments" of spontaneous communication when we work in remote teams. If we do not, then there is a risk that I only call when I need something or have a problem - the answer is planned spontaneous communication
When we ask people what they want from their global managers, "accessibility" is always high on the list.
But what does accessibility really mean?
The type of service you experience in the air is determined by your cultural background
When someone is 3,000 miles away, how do you tell him his work is not up to scratch?
As organisations become more and more global, both employees and managers are drawn into international projects.
Many international organisations have introduced some form of
organisation structure involving two or more lines of reporting – a matrix.
If you heard that a colleague had been spotted wandering around Paris, mobile phone in hand, reading the inscriptions on the Arc de Triomphe, and loitering around in the Louvre, you might be hard put to believe that it was all in the interests of meeting the global challenge
International supply chains are increasingly common but merely imposing your practices on other business cultures can be very destructive.
Globalisation is a major challenge - no more so than for HR people, who often find themselves torn between local loyalties and central processes. New research from Global integration shows the particular challenges of building a truly integrated international HR function
