Employees change desks each year for stronger teamwork at Care.com.
In his review of Staying Healthy in Sick Organizations: The Clover Practice™, UK Consultant Philip Whiteley seized on “Declare Your Interdependence.”
Three Secrets for a Successful Strategic Planning Process
I have facilitated close to 200 strategic planning processes. Here are three secrets for a successful strategic planning process. Also you can join me for a webinar “Successfully Implementing Your Strategic Plan” on Thursday, June 17, 12:00-1:15 p.m. CDT. The Magna Publications program is aimed at higher education, but the techniques are applicable to any organization.
Collaboration in Action
We have an opportunity to get up to speed on today’s most pressing leadership and human productivity issues. Human resource leaders in the Madison area are collaborating to offer a day of hot topics as part of a larger conference of the IPMA-HR Central regional conference. This collaborative learning event takes place on Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at the Madison Marriott West. (The full IPMA-HR event runs June 6-9.)
I was furious. My 83 year old mother had arrived at the hospital via ambulance. She was having trouble breathing and chest pains. Her thin body was trembling and her words were slurred.
Thanks to the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, you can measure for free how well collaboration is going.
Even with only 29% of Americans saying they are engaged in their work, it can still be a hard sell to get organizations to question how their employees feel about working for them and how engaged they are in the work of the enterprise.
A strategic plan can be a powerful and energizing force uniting members of a nonprofit organization in working together toward shared aims. What distinguishes plans that are engines for growth and improvement from those that mainly stay on the shelf? On Monday, March 8, I shared research conducted on the UW-Madison campus which identifies several factors that correlate highly with successful execution of a plan. We discussed tools that ranged across developing the plan and evaluating it, communicating the plan, implementing, and budgeting. Melinda V. Heinritz, Executive Director, Wisconsin Historical Foundation, shared planning approaches that have resulted in significant gains for her organization.
The Communiversity Session was sponsored by the UW Center for Nonprofits. I will send you the handout, just contact me at kathleen@kathleenparis.com.
It’s an old fashioned approach to think we have to know all the answers before we are willing to communicate with clients, colleagues, customers or stakeholders. Inviting them to contribute to solutions is respectful and appreciative. This open approach is also very likely to shed useful light on the problem itself.
The World Café is a technique for really engaging people in questions and issues that matter to them. It combines doodling or drawing on the table followed by discussion and the opportunity to move to a different table with a different question and another round of writing, drawing and discussion.
Readers share their approaches for saying thank you to colleagues, co-workers, and clients. These suggestions followed the post “The Imperative to Say Thank You.”
If we really believed that our success at work depends on other people being successful in their jobs, what would we do differently?
I ask this in the context of exploring our interdependence as people working within the same organization. We Americans have a dim sense of our interdependence with each other and with the rest of the world.
Yet, no matter what our role is, we are supported by many other people of whose work we may know nothing. How many times do we think about the people who are on the roof fixing the leaks or the people who deliver the products or the people whose job it is to find resources for the organization or those who ensure that everyone gets a paycheck?
It grates on me when I hear people talk about “soft skills.” Although definitions vary, soft skills generally refer to the ability to communicate effectively, knit a group of people together toward achieving a goal, and create a sense of shared community and purpose. CareerBuilder.com’s Kate Lorenz describes these as “interpersonal skills and leadership qualities to guide teams of diverse professionals.”
“…Firms today are having a very difficult time finding managers who have superior ‘soft skills’,” says John P. Kreiss, president of SullivanKreiss, a recruitment and placement firm for design and construction professionals. Based on my own consulting practice, I would have to agree that most workplaces could do with more soft skills.
Our language is part of the problem. By calling them “soft,” we are demoting this constellation of abilities and skills to something frilly, mushy and largely unimportant. Let’s find a more fitting term for them.
This amazing “word cloud” was created by Wordle at http://wordle.net. The site creates customized word clouds from any text that you provide. Words that appear more frequently in the source text show up relatively larger. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The resulting images can be printed, shared on a BLOG. Heck, you can even put the images on T-shirts. You can put your Wordles in the on-line gallery which is open for the universe to see which is why so many of them are anonymous.