by Charles Plant | Jul 15, 2013 | Leadership Development
I was procrastinating this morning and ended up watching a video that featured Kevin O’Leary (aka Mr Wonderful) as he waxed poetic about being a Bosshole. I never thought I would see someone actually be proud of this.
In leadership parlance, one of the marks of a good leader is someone who is sensitive to and works to promote morale in a group. The opposite if this is a Bosshole, which the Urban Dictionary defines as “an employer of a particularly evil nature, completely devoid of empathy or concern for anyone else. the deadly hybrid of boss and asshole.”
Many organizations seem to tolerate Bossholes if they get results. In many cases it may be the dirty little secret of organizations that they keep the morale destroyers on staff as long as results pour in.
So then does morale really matter or is it only results that matter? Is it OK to be a Bosshole as long as you get results? Does bad morale necessarily lead to bad results?
I think the key is that it isn’t necessary to be a Bosshole to get good results. Since it isn’t necessary and there are nicer ways of getting the same results, then why would anyone want to be a Bosshole? The thing about Mr Wonderful is that he seems to want to be a Bosshole.
by Charles Plant | Jul 12, 2013 | Leadership Development
Spoiler alert – Do not read this if you intend to watch the Tour de France later today.
Today’s Tour de France was an amazing spectacle of how you can succeed by cooperating with your competition. In fact in the Tour, if you want to win, you must cooperate with your competitors.
Today was a 173 km flat stage ending in Saint-Amand-Montrond. As a flat stage, there isn’t usually much drama as everyone rides together with the peleton until the sprinters make a mad dash at the end.
What made today’s tour different and was damaging to Chris Froome, the Tour leader was a nasty side wind that kept breaking the peleton into smaller and smaller groups until a final break of 14 riders including Alberto Contador prevailed and Mark Cavendish sprinted to victory.
What was interesting though was to watch how competing teams worked together to either get a jump on the competition or try to catch up to the leaders. It was an ever evolving game of cat and mouse where you cooperated with another team one minute and then left them in the ditch when you decided they were ripe for competition.
What it reminded me was of the game for promotions in large corporations where employees cooperate only until such time as they think they can get the leap on co-workers and then they turn cooperation into competition.
It also mimics corporate strategies that have major firms cooperating to further their joint aims while they are looking for chances to drive into a competitive mode.
On a side note, this is what you get to do when you don’t have a boss. You can sit around all morning watching the Tour and claim that it is research.
by Charles Plant | Jul 11, 2013 | Uncategorized
I watched an excellent video today with Mario Laudi and Kristina McDougall of The Laudi Group. While the topic is about hiring, I think it is an excellent perspective on what you must have to get a new job and succeed in a small company.
It’s a long video but well worth the time.
To me it’s all about aptitude. If the world is changing so fast, what you know now won’t matter in 5 – 10 years. What you need is the right attitude and the right set of soft skills to be able to learn what you’ll need to be successful.
by Charles Plant | Jul 10, 2013 | Leadership Development
As I watched Rob Ford talk yesterday about the Great Toronto Flood I couldn’t help but compare him to Naheed Nenshi. (Smaller city, bigger flood.) Without trying to bash Ford as there are enough people to do this, I tried to figure out what makes Nenshi such a good leader.
They were both elected at the same time and there are quite a few people out there wondering if the two cities got their mayors reversed. After all, Toronto is a really cool place isn’t it and Calgary is just a hick town? So how did we get the hick as mayor and Calgary got the social media savant?
The thing about Nenshi is his ability to communicate. He stayed awake during their crisis, keeping Calgarians informed. He was online, constantly tweeting. Throughout the crisis he looked in control, he looked calm and competent.
And I think that’s the key to his latest performance. He made Calgarians feel safe in a time of crisis. If leadership is a lot about emotions then he displayed exactly the type of emotions needed in the situation.
by Charles Plant | Jul 8, 2013 | Leadership Development
Why is it that managers think teamwork is better than employees do? Everyone says that managers are oblivious to reality and don’t really know what’s going on in their companies but until now, I have yet to see this reflected in research.
We just surveyed 500 knowledge workers to see what they think. The survey has shown that managers see their work much more positively than do their employees. Either something isn’t getting through to management or they are ignoring problems.
Whatever the cause, the result is that managers don’t put in the programs that are necessary to improve teamwork at work.
We wanted to look at how knowledge workers view their organization in terms of teamwork and the people they work with. To do this we looked at five specific attributes of the workplace: Teamwork, Positivity, Trust, Commitment, and Respect.
In the first of the findings, we determined that most employees think that they work well together as a team. In fact 73% agree or disagree with the statement “We work well together as a team.”
Unfortunately, managers seem to think that teamwork is a lot better than employees do. While managers have a positive net promoter score of 2%, employees have a negative score of negative 3%.
You can check out the results of the research here.
