Pixar Fosters Creative Community

by | Communication, Conversation, & Confrontation, For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Team Manager Skills

 

 

I believe that community matters. … Pixar is a community in the true sense of the word. We think that lasting relationships matter, and we share some basic beliefs:

  • Talent is rare.
  • Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur….we don’t second-guess or micromanage.
  • It must be safe to tell the truth. …get honest feedback from everyone.
  • We must constantly challenge all of our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture. …Nobody pulls any punches to be polite.

Pixar’s Operating Principles

1. Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone.

2. It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas.

3. We must stay close to innovations happening in the academic community.

… if we aren’t always at least a little scared, we’re not doing our job.

 

 

–How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity
by Ed Catmull, President
Harvard Business Review

 

 

 

Major Consultancy Simplifies Performance Reviews

by | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Team Manager Skills

 

 

Everyone loves to hate performance evaluations, and with good reason: Research has shown them to be ineffective, unreliable and unsatisfactory for seemingly everyone involved. They consume way too much time, leave most workers deflated and feel increasingly out of step with reality.

…more than half the executives questioned (58%) believe that their current performance management approach drives neither employee engagement nor high performance. [Click here to see the survey.]

 

 

…conversations about year-end ratings are generally less valuable than conversations conducted in the moment about actual performance.

 

 

Three items correlated best with high performance for a team:

  1. I have the chance to use my strengths every day
  2. My coworkers are committed to doing quality work
  3. The mission of our company inspires me

 

 

It’s not the particular number we assign to a person that’s the problem; rather, it’s the fact that there is a single number. … we want our organizations to know us, and we want to know ourselves at work, and that can’t be compressed into a single number.

—Reinventing Performance Management
Harvard Business Review

The new approach focuses, alternatively, on how to develop employees in the future given their current performance.

 

–What if you could replace performance evaluations
with four simple questions?
Deloitte has come up with them
(and two only need a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer).
By Jena McGregor in the Washington Post

 

 

More on this blog about improving employee evaluations

 

 

Marriott: Happy Employees = Happy Customers

by | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Team Manager Skills

It’s always been the major belief of our company, take good care of your people, they’ll take good care of the customer and the customer will come back.

And we celebrate them. We train them. We teach them. We provide opportunity for them. You’ve got to make your employees happy.

If the employees are happy, they are going to make the customers happy.

–J. W. Marriott, Jr.
 speaking of his father,
the founder of Marriott Hotels

How Bill Marriott’s Putting Employees First Transformed A Family Root Beer Stand Into $14B Hotel Giant by Steve Forbes in Forbes Magazine January 8, 2014 

Humanized Work with an Emphasis on Mastery of Craft

by | Communication, Conversation, & Confrontation, For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Meetings, Team Manager Skills

 

 

I was very pleased to see an international expert on software development express the following clear insights into the types of workplaces my executive coaching seeks to foster.

Visionaries are designing organizations for collaboration. These firms remove the bottlenecks imposed by the strict hierarchies of the past. [In hierarchical firms] no one was being rewarded for taking the kind of risks that lead to innovation or other breakthroughs in performance which thrive in a climate of collaboration.

Knowledge workers spend a large proportion of their time seeking information, much of the rest making sense of what they’ve found, and relatively little time in applying what they now know.

Transitioning from a hierarchical way of working … requires letting go of habitual behaviors that may have worked well in the hierarchy, but no longer serve anyone when collaboration becomes a critical part of the work process.
…

[The result is] … humanized work with an emphasis on mastery of our craft, a focus on rapid learning and feedback, delivery of business value (sooner not faster), and close connection to customer needs (even ones the customers’ haven’t noticed yet).
…

 

— Diana Larsen on Agile Fluency,
Barriers to Agility &
the value of Open Space Technology
in InfoQ

 

 

Anti-Manifesto: What Executive Coach Tony Mayo is not

by | For Business Owners

 

 

I am not a consultant. I do not create documents or deliverables.

I do not parachute in to do the job of my client or of their employees.

I do not press my advice on clients or try to make their decisions. (Click to read how a client describes being coached by Tony Mayo,)

I do not fix or cure people. I’m not a psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist. (Read more on the distinction between executive coaching and therapy by clicking here.)

I am not an entertainer. My goal is not to have my audience enjoy my presentations, feel more comfortable or pleased with themselves, laugh at my jokes, or like me. I am only interested in coaching people toward causing lives they love.

Results matter. If what I do makes no difference I have failed.

I’m out to make people’s lives satisfying and fulfilling, to help them matter and have positive impact. I foster workplaces of humanity and prosperity by coaching the leaders of organizations.

I am an executive coach.

 

 

Coaching from the Man Who Launched 40,000 Businesses

by | For Business Owners

 

 

Failing entrepreneur: “My problem is money.”

Entrepreneurship Coach: “No, your problem is trying to do everything yourself. Finding people is your job.”

…

One of Sirolli’s current goals is to work with business schools to shift the nature of entrepreneurial education. “Most schools teach entrepreneurs that they must have all the skills—product, marketing, financial management. They reward students for putting together a go-it-alone business plan instead of collaborating or identifying who they need to start a business with. In this way, [the schools] often set their students up for failure.”

…

I told [the trainee coach], “There are just two things you should never do. Don’t initiate anything yourself and never try to motivate people.”

The newly anointed [Entrepreneurship Coach] objected that it would be a disaster to rely on locals for ideas, but promised to do “nothing” until given different instructions. Within two months, he had 46 projects under way.

–Ernesto Sirolli, Ph.D.
The Entrepreneurship Coach
by Sally Helgesen
in Strategy + Business

 

 

What would you give up to truly give?

by | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Leadership Development, Quotes and Aphorisms, Team Manager Skills

 

 

It is rare indeed that people give.

 

Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is the system of reality in what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself – that is to say, risking oneself.

 

If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.

 

–The Price of the Ticket:
Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985
by James Baldwin
Page 370