MOR Insight

The Tuesday Reading for today is Jeffrey Pfeffer’s piece, Stop Working for Technology – Make it Work for You which appeared in BNET’s The Corner Office on July 22, 2009.  Pfeffer is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

For today’s reading, we turn to a December 2007 FastCompany article by William Taylor, The Leader of the Future.  In this piece Taylor, one of the founders of FastCompany, reports on a discussion with Ron Heifetz, director of the Leadership Education Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.  You will likely remember that Heifetz is author of one of the views of leadership we studied early in the l

For today’s reading we turn to John Baldoni’s blog at the Harvard Business Review for his piece “How to Make People Passionate About Their Work”.  

Baldoni notes that generating passion for what you do is essential, and doubly so in difficult times.  He goes on to say that it is essential for a leader to have passion as it is vital to convincing others that their work matters.

He offers three suggestions for cultivating passion:

Much of a leader’s time is spent, formally or informally, working to influence decision makers, typically peers, cross-organizational colleagues, or those higher up in the organization.  The Tuesday Reading this week – Effectively Influencing Decision Makers:  Ensuring That Your Knowledge Makes a Difference – focuses on just this subject.

There’s lots of advice on finding and attracting staff and on identifying and retaining top performers you already have.  Stephen DeMaio, in a recent blog entry – “How to Identify Employees’ Hidden Talents” – argues that it is even more important to look for your current staff's hidden strengths to find new skills and talents that have value to the organization.

DeMano suggests four approaches:

It seems like every week I hear of universities planning for, going through, or having recently experienced layoffs, terminations, or position eliminations as a result of the economic crisis we are experiencing.  Today’s reading – “Ask the Expert:  How Do Effective Leaders Handle Change?” -- is by Mark Hannum, Principle Consultant at Linkage and looks at practices that enable leaders to be more effective in such tough times.   

Hannum talks in this short piece about many aspects of layoffs and offers a number of specific suggestions:

Well-integrated, high-performing teams, teams that “click,” is the subject of today's Tuesday Reading – “How Leaders Get Their Teams To ‘Click’”  by Phil Harken.  Such teams never lose slight of their goals and are largely self-sustaining.  They often seem to take on a life of their own.  Studies by the European Centre for Organizational Research show that teams that “click” always have a “leader who creates the environment and establishes the operating principles and values that are conducive to high performance.”

This week, for the week's Tuesday Reading, I turn to a recent message from the ITLP IX Vision Team:  "The Key to Getting Lucky:  PRACTICE!!!"  

The Key to Getting Lucky: PRACTICE!!!

A Golf Story

Today's Tuesday Reading is "Making Decisions Outside Your Repertoire"  by Ronald Heifetz (you remember him from the first session of the Leadership Program), Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow.

Today’s Tuesday Reading is from the April 28, 2009 Ask Annie column of Fortune Magazine:  “How to work better with Gen Y”.  The April 28th question has to do with working with a new class of interns – Generation Y individuals;  birth years 1978-1990 – who are very much like our younger employees.