Read our latest articles and posts below.
Keeping You Informed
Helping Your People Embrace Change
People don’t have a problem with change; they have a problem with the uncertainty it creates. Change forces us not only to recognize that we can’t rest in our comfort zone, but that we need to confront the fact that we might not be able to look forward sufficiently to see where we will land. Let’s explore three common reactions to change in the workplace.
Teamwork in the Modern Workplace: Why Collaboration Often Fails and How to Fix It
A true team operates with a shared purpose and unified goals. Too often, organizations assume collaboration will magically happen, while in reality, individual departments prioritize their own objectives, leading to siloed efforts and competing priorities.
Five Steps to Effectively Facilitating a Group
Want to transform your meetings from time-wasters to productive powerhouses? Discover the five essential elements that can elevate your facilitation skills and engage your audience like never before. Learn to unlock the secrets of effective facilitation and take your group discussions to the next level.
A Bias Toward Action
What is a bias toward action? It’s moving quickly on an idea with a recognition that there is never enough information to guarantee success. It’s making time for conversation and, when the time is right, declaring the conversation to be over. It’s leadership delegating authority to someone who will pull the lever and begin the work.
Innovation as a Social Practice: The Art of Making Offers
Social practices can also be applied to innovation. Across organizations, individuals are responsible for taking care of concerns and bringing awareness to problems that affect how work gets done. Recognizing these inefficiencies, however, is not the same as addressing them. In order to bring new ideas into being, consider the action of making offers.
Exercising Power in Higher Education Leadership
Leadership is about exercising power, but not as force or domination. We increase our personal power by engaging authentically with others in the mission while exercising the authority we’ve been granted to improve outcomes. What allows some to lean in and make unpopular decisions?
Repairing Trust
A complaint is simply a manifestation of unresolved dissatisfaction that lingers over time. Each one of us has experienced this at work as well as in our personal lives. One way to address a complaint is to name your concern and turn it into a request.
Breaking Down Silos; It's Not Rocket Science
Colleges and universities, corporations, local government — pick any organization with two or more departments — have got a silo problem. What would have to change to tear down these artificially constructed walls that create misunderstandings, gaps in communication, all leading to rampant inefficiencies?
Navigating Shared Governance
Shared governance is the decision-making model that guides leaders across all higher education institutions. There is much written about this model of authority being delegated from the board to administration, and then from administration to the academy. In a perfect world, the Board oversees and guides, the administration develops tangible strategies to fund and execute, and the academy provides the intellectual rigor and evidence that validates the strategy.
Leading Culture Change
Culture is your greatest strength and greatest weakness. When leaders put new processes, systems or structures in place, the reaction is often some form of resistance. Your people do not have a problem with change, they have a problem with uncertainty.
Teams that Focus on Results
What is Patrick Lencioni's major premise on how groups develop into high-performing teams? In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, it comes down to five qualities that people bring to group dynamics: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and a focus on results. When these qualities are present, groups are able to accomplish extraordinary things. In the absence of these qualities, groups become mired in personality and political distractions that take away from achieving their goals.