I’m embarrassed to admit that it had never occurred to me to distinguish between self-managed and self directed teams. I found this reprintable article that makes a case for making the distinction, so I’m putting it up here. Enjoy!
Apr
16
Category Archives: Managing and Organizations
Apr
16
Exhorting Employee To Work Harder – Common Managerial Mistakes Series
It’s not surprising that managers try to improve productivity and employee effectiveness by exhorting staff to “try harder”, or to make more of an effort in their jobs. It’s a natural human tendency to assume that the simple act of trying harder will result in better results, but more times than not, the assumption is incorrect.
Learn more about this common managerial mistake, its pitfalls, and what to do about it
In our often Western dominated organizational thinking, we attribute a lot of employee success (and our own success) to “trying harder”, or “working harder”. This assumption about the relationship of effort to effectiveness is often incorrect, since there are many more powerful forced that influence results.
Managers often get caught up in the idea that “if only employees would try harder, or work harder, we’d get far better results”. Caught in this incorrect assumption, they rely on exhortation of employees to improve productivity. It doesn’t usually work, and it can end up backfiring.
Apr
16
Inconsistent Trust Destroying Management Behavior – Common Managerial Mistake Series
When you strip away the effects of various nuts and bolts management techniques, what you find is that effective managers succeed because they build trusting relationships with their employees.
Trust, in turn, builds employee loyalty and motivation. Trust evolves over time, of course, but it can be eroded quickly if managers appear to be inconsistent or unpredicatable, to employees. Learn the importance of consistent manager behavior.
Apr
15
Over Empowering Employees – Common Managerial Mistake Series
Managers, influenced by the “employee empowerment” buzz of the late ’90′s sometimes place too much emphasis on insisting that ALL employees exercise more power, discretion and decision-making in their jobs. The result can be the appearance of indecisiveness on the part of managers, and a desire, on the part of employees, to be “left alone” to do their jobs within a more limited scope. Learn how to avoid this common error on employee empowerment.
As a result of the encouragement of management gurus in the late 1990′s empowerment became a state of affairs of value in and of itself. While having employees capable and willing to make decisions and act on their own is a good situation, some managers have taken the concept too far.
Apr
14
Leaders Who Refuse To Lead – Common Managerial Mistake Series
Often, the only path to career advancement involves promotion to a higher level in the organization — to a supervisory, managerial, or executive position. However, not everyone is suited to, or understands that being promoted to such a position means that one automatically is expected to lead those that are “underneath” in the hierarchy.
It’s not uncommon for people to accept such a promotion, without understanding the leadership responsibilities, or without a willingness to carry them out.
Apr
08
Cookie Cutter Performance Appraisals – Perfect Phrases For Performance Reviews
Today two blogger posted comments on the use of cookie cutter phrases in performance appraisals, references my books, and those of another writer. The two blogs are available along with my very very brief comments:
here and
Feb
26
Performance evaluations in hard times – What to do.
A poster on trdev-l asked about how to handle performance evaluations when the company will not be offering pay raises due to the recession. Here’s my response
Good question. I know this has come up in other places. I think that if you have been stressing that the major reason for evaluations is to determine raises,then basically you are screwed, because both
managers and employees will balk, and the latter will almost certainly see evaluations as hypocritical and fake.
Jan
25
Free-Bacal & Associates Management & Executive Development Toolbar
Thought I would pass this on. We’ve created a toolbar that fits in to your IE or Firefox browser and gives you easy, free access to some incredible articles, audio, and video for managers, supervisors and executives. Here’s the overview:
Addresses manager, supervisor and executive need for professional development and updating. Free, easy to use toolbar brings educational audio, video and articles so they are available at the fingertips of any manager or executive using Firefox or IE. Features include free access to selected Harvard Business videos, access to business, leadership, management podcasts and audio programs, plus easy access to selected high quality articles.
Jun
05
On Leadership and Self-Directed Teams
The point I was trying to make is that even in situations where self-directed teams are desired, leadership MUST exist somewhere in the organization to make them work.
Think of it like a garden. For my garden to flourish in a way that pleases me, I can’t simply let it do what it likes, in the guise of abdicating leadership, no matter how I change my label, or envision my role.