How Diversity Management Fuels Procter & Gamble’s Success
When A.G. Lafley became CEO of Procter & Gamble in 2000, the company had a commercial success rate of 15 to 20 percent. Less than a decade later, P&G’s success rate was up to 50 to 60 percent. The company has only gotten stronger since then. There’s no mystery to P&G’s rapid growth and continuing […]
Determining the Real Value of Representation: Diversity of Perspective
It’s easy to take the “affirmative action approach” to representation. That’s when a company says “We’ve got 100 thousand employees, but only 2 percent of them are women. We have to go and artificially raise that number to 17 percent.” But this approach to representation is only surface-level. It doesn’t take into account the real […]
Why Nothing Stifles Ideas Like a Culture of Harmony
Embracing Deliberate DiversityTM means learning to communicate in a diverse environment. This can be a challenge for employees, because communication in Deliberate DiversityTM often differs from what they’re used to. The key is to be clear about what Deliberate DiversityTM is and how it works. Make People Rock the Boat You’ve hired people for their unique […]
If Your Inner Circle Backs You Up 100% of the Time, Here’s What You’re Doing Wrong
Hank Paulson, the former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, has said that every leader that he’s worked with has had significant blind spots – and he’s worked with a lot of important leaders in the financial world. These leaders know they have strengths and weaknesses. What they do is surround themselves with people who complement their […]
Stop Managing Millennials: Manage The Individual
By 2015, Millennials will represent the largest generational cohort in the workforce. If you believe some of the leading news sources, this will be the apocalypse. According to them, Millennials are strange creatures that do not play by the old rules of the workplace. If you ask me, this sensationalism hardly qualifies as journalism. Millennials […]
What is Leadership? Gaps In The Research
What is leadership? There is no current communal definition of leadership, which has led to widespread confusion. We blur the lines between leadership and management, and our discussions of leadership often become fanciful and unfocused. We need to fix this by clarifying the definitions of the two. We should view leadership, management, teamwork, and strategy as […]
Putting Employees First: People-Centered Approaches To Management
If we want to see how current management thinking has evolved, we should first review history. The formal study of management is a relatively new concept: it began in the late nineteenth century, when Henri Fayol introduced his 14 principles of management. Frederick Taylor further formalized the study of management when he introduced the principles […]
The Rise of Leadership: Leadership in the 20th/21st Century
I’ve never seen leaders and managers as separate people – rather, I believe that leadership and management are different roles. Leaders must often be managers, and managers must often be leaders. Even though the business world is currently obsessed with leaders at the expense of managers, this was not always the case. In the early 20th century businesses emphasized […]
The Dangers Of Over-Emphasizing Leadership
Once the idea of “leadership” entered the corporate lexicon, a major effort to elevate the role of the leader ensued. But as organizations elevated leaders, they undervalued the roles of managers. What businesses need is a balance between leadership and management. Unfortunately, too many focus all of their attention on leadership and fail to cultivate managers. The “Holy […]
Management Still Matters: Supervising the Over-Led and Under-Managed Workforce
At the team level and throughout organizations of all sizes, a lot of good management is taking place. The problem is that we often refer to that good management as “leadership.” By doing so, we confuse the people who are really doing the hard work of day-to-day, face-to-face interface with employees, the people who make sure that […]