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In modern times we are in serious danger of believing that those who talk the loudest and the most will win the day. My experience over the years has been that those leaders who can actually keep their mouths shut and ears open have a better chance of being heard, believed and followed.
Rekindling the Lost Art of Listening
When employees leave an organization, they depart with more than what they know; they also leave with critical knowledge about who they know. Thus, the departure of key people can significantly affect the relationship structure and consequent functioning of an organization. In particular, companies should be aware of the unique knowledge held by three important types of employees: “central connectors” (those who are regularly asked for help, typically because they have a high level of expertise in one or more areas), “brokers” (those who act as bridges across subgroups) and “peripheral players” (those who reside on the boundaries of a network but could still possess valuable niche expertise and outside knowledge). Departure of an employee who filled any one of these roles presents knowledge-loss risks that need to be addressed. The departure of a handful of key brokers, for example, could fracture the social network of an organization into isolated subgroups. Thus companies need to take various measures to (1) identify key knowledge vulnerabilities by virtue of both what a person knows and how that individual’s departure will affect a network and (2) address specific knowledge-loss issues based on the different roles that employees play in the network.
Sloan Management Review, “Strategies for Preventing a Knowledge-Loss Crisis” - Summer 2006
Let’s run through some possible lessons that might be drawn from the horror that is Boston’s Big Dig: It shows us why government shouldn’t be trusted with big projects. It teaches us the folly of trying anything dramatically different in highway design. It shows that Massachusetts is the most incompetent place in America. It shows Boston to be a sinkhole of waste and corruption. So which is the right lesson? Actually, none of the above. The real lesson of the Big Dig is much more interesting.
Civic Strategies E-Letter: Suspenders Need Belts: What’s the Lesson of the Big Dig?
Businesses and cities have entirely different concepts of the future. To cities, the future is everything; it’s why you work so hard today planning and making small improvements. To businesses, the future is nice but the present is everything. After all, if you run out of cash today, there will be no future. Perhaps that’s the best way of understanding the dispute between Washington, D.C. and its baseball team, the Nationals.
The contracting of public services has long been an integral part of the work of public managers, and the growing governmental reliance on markets for the purchase of goods and provision of services suggests that contract management is not a fad, but rather a skill set that will be required of all public managers, now and into the future. This essay synthesizes current research and thinking about the myriad components of government contracting and provides a theoretically grounded framework that offers heuristics with utility for busy practitioners and scholars. We discuss some of the contracting challenges that public managers wrestle with, such as balancing equity with efficiency and confronting the frequent problem of imperfect markets, in the context of being smart buyers of goods and services.
Successful Organizational Change in the Public Sector - Managing Public Service Contracts: Aligning Values, Institutions, and Markets
What lessons does prior research on employee motivation offer public managers operating in, and researchers studying the dynamics of, a new governance era of results-based, downsized, networked, and customer-focused public organizations? We summarize in this article what a voluminous body of prior social and behavioral science research tells us about motivating human performance in public, private, and nonprofit organizations. Informing the analysis is a “review of reviews” of a sprawling research base that examines four elements of the traditional performance paradigm: financial incentives, job design, employee participation, and goal setting (Locke et al. 1980). We discern from this formidable body of research what is known about employee motivation, what is left to know, and how useful the classic performance paradigm is in light of these new governance challenges.
Sweeping contextual changes surrounding the way the public’s business is conducted suggest a renewed need to visit the drivers of human performance in the public sector. … These transformations are so sweeping that it is impossible to summarize all of them, but several merit attention in passing.
The first and most general transformation is globalization, the integration of economic, cultural, and political systems across geographic boundaries. ….
A second sweeping transformation involves a cluster of factors related to the demographics of the workforce. The World War II generation is passing from the scene, baby boomers are turning 60, generations new to the workforce are both quite varied and different from their elders, and the workforce is increasingly diverse.
The third sweeping change encompasses the nature of work itself. Work is more knowledge based and interdependent. Lateral relationships—working across boundaries—have become far more prevalent than relationships managed by simple hierarchy. ….
As an outgrowth of globalization, changing demographics and work, and evolving worldviews of governance, institutional rules that long have been taken for granted also are changing. Rules that we once took as givens, such as security of employment and defined benefit retirement systems, are now giving way to rules that are financially more predictable and less generous. …
Despite the fundamental transformations in the world around us, are the underlying motivational dynamics or the programs to realize them different? If the performance paradigm is different, how has it changed? Now is an appropriate time to take stock. What we “take for granted” not only may have changed because of changing contexts and institutions, but what we took for granted may have been distorted because of myths and stereotypes.
Motivation in Public Organizations
Being an effective leader is challenging even when times are good, let alone during a time of corporate scandals and a rapidly transforming global economy.
Paul Taffinder, a partner in the London office of management consulting firm Marakon Associates, and author of The Leadership Crash Course: How to Create Personal Leadership Value (Kogan Page, 2006), spoke recently with The Wall Street Journal Online about what it takes to be a good leader and the difficulty of leading through uncertainty. Some questions and answers were edited.
Imagine you were recruited to be CEO of a company that you weren’t familiar with. To get to know the business, what would you ask for (after, of course, negotiating an outrageous salary, a luxury car lease, a fat pension, stock options and bonuses)? One of the first things: the company’s vision and mission statements, which describe how the company distinguishes itself from all others. Now, imagine that you’re a brand-new mayor or city manager. Go ahead: Ask for your community’s vision statement. Say, what?Most cities don’t have vision statements (or, if they do, they’re either so vague and all-embracing that they’re useless or are focused entirely on the government itself). But imagine a city with a distinctive vision statement, one that actually sets forth what the community intends to be. What would that be like? Well, it would be a lot like Blaine, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul.
The McKinsey Quarterly: Applying lean production to the public sector
An inside look at one of the most exclusive intellectual clubs in the world - and how you can set up your own brain trust.
Here’s an idea: Gather up the smartest people in the world, put them in a room with executives from your agency, close the door and let the conversations begin. Unlike innovative ideas that develop on the back of dirty cocktail napkins, this one developed in a gorgeous, glass-walled house on a rocky spine overlooking the Big Sur coast in Carmel Highlands, Calif. There, in 1994, a dozen military and information technology experts gathered to consider the impacts of IT and globalization on the United States and on warfare. How would the Internet and other emerging technologies change the world?
Start Your Idea Engines (Government Executive, 5/15/06)
