Most members of leadership teams would recognise the conflict and ineffectiveness that arises from members pulling in different directions. Team alignment is much discussed but few leaders agree exactly what it means, let alone know how to achieve it. It’s simpler than you might think and this article shows how. Alignment – the Holy Grail for leadership teams? Every leader I have met would recognise this image as a representation of a team who are working to different agendas and looking to different goals. Enormous energy is wasted by all of the members of these teams in understanding and reconciling the different positions, and by the leader in particular. Even when the competing viewpoints are brought together the discussions and decisions that ensue are usually poor and badly implemented. These compromises take two forms:- In order to gain agreement, a ‘lowest common denominator’ compromise is reached. Everyone knows that it’s a sub optimal answer but also accepts that it’s the best that
Read More
Do You Need to Improve Your Productivity?
FW Taylor on improving productivity Do you ever despair about the inefficiency of your organisation – or of the way you spend your own time? If so then our first great leadership thinker, FW Taylor, has some ideas that can help you break through to be more productive. FW Taylor – Who’s he? Frederick Winslow Taylor focused his thinking on the improvement of work and productivity in the emerging workplaces of the industrial revolution. I’ll let Peter Drucker introduce him to you:- “He was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study. On Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ rests, above all, the tremendous surge of affluence in the last seventy-five years in the developed countries. Taylor was the Isaac Newton of the science of work and laid the first foundations to which not much has been added since” Recognise any of this? Taylor called his approach to work and productivity ‘Scientific Management’. It was a large body of work but some of the key principles
Read More