Supervisors See Four Kinds of Personnel

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What makes a good worker? Here is a collection of criteria from seven different types of organization, where Supervisors – not Managers – defined four levels of employees.

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Trump Abandons a Basic Element of Good Management

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The US president has reduced the White House press briefings to once a month, and those conversations could go to zero soon. An article about the Die-out of Press Briefings says Trump told his Press Secretary not to bother with briefings anymore. That’s a mistake. I remember when my boss, in a job I held […]

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Explaining Goals & Strategies is Not Enough: Bridging the Vertical Disconnect

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Top executives, middle managers, supervisors, and worker-bees: they live in different worlds and have different purposes. How to create better alignment? Here’s an idea for a productive framework of communications.

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Why Executives are Cautious about Implementing Change

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We wonder why executives don’t leap at the chance to make “changes for the better” in their organizations. Here’s a thought: you’re not changing one thing – you’re changing a network. Put on the kid gloves.

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Create Space in an Overwhelmed Life: A Recipe

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Sometimes we run down so slowly that we don’t notice when it’s time to off-load some of the things that are piling up around us. Here’s a recipe that worked for a couple people I know. Myself included.

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Productive Meetings Don’t Just Happen

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The meeting didn’t go well. In fact, one executive walked out before it was formally ended. Several people were annoyed or impatient while others, looking bored, simply didn’t participate. It was ultimately a waste of people’s time and energy, and left a few bad feelings to be cleaned up later. What was the purpose of […]

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Communicating for Change (this works at home too)

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Jeffrey presented a case study to his masters-level students in a Human Resources Management class last week. The case was about a complete communication breakdown between two groups of workers in an organization: Engineers and Installers. Engineers sent a Work Order to the Installers telling them how to do a job. The installers did the job, but […]

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Change Fatigue – A Simple Remedy

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I just got word that organizations are changing so many things at once – IT, performance reviews, operational procedures – that an organizational disease is spreading fast: Change Fatigue. My co-author husband, Jeffrey, is in Vancouver wrapping up the Academy of Management conference there. He was on a panel to discuss “resistance to change” – a […]

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No Follow-Up? Management is Missing!

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One of Jeffrey’s MBA students sent him this email (edited for brevity here) a while ago. The “lessons learned” here deserve to be shared: Professor Ford, In 2010, I worked at the United States Forces Iraq Headquarters in Baghdad.  I was part of a communications cell that developed communication plans in support of named operations […]

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Building Teamwork is Not About Fixing Feelings

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A manager – let’s call her Sarah – was instructed by her boss to find ways to improve teamwork in their complex working environment. “People don’t collaborate,” she explained. “People don’t talk with each other about things they need to know.” The whole group was about 45 people, but they are segmented into 7 different […]

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