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Articles by Rick Lepsinger
Agile Leadership: A Comprehensive Guide
Today’s ideal leadership candidates are not necessarily employees with the most experience or expertise. One of the key differentiators among top leaders is leadership agility, or the ability to balance competing demands. Agile leaders foster connections with team members and customers, enable teams to achieve peak performance, and encourage both innovation and change. Contents What is Agile Leadership?
How to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, manage, and express one’s personal feelings. High emotional intelligence is critical for establishing and maintaining close personal relationships, and it’s also important from a leadership and a team-building perspective. Many of the soft skills required for leadership success are driven by high emotional intelligence, and some of the problems that lead to dysfunctional teams are caused by low levels of emotional intelligence.
Collaboration Tools That Will Enhance Virtual Team Productivity
Working in virtual teams has become the “new normal” of business life today. Remotely distributed teams allow organizations to leverage their workforce more effectively and bring the most talented and knowledgeable people together to address their most pressing problems. At first glance, managing a virtual team may not seem very different from leading one in person, but there are some significant distinctions. The most obvious is the fact that team members don’t occupy the same physical space.
7 Creative Virtual Team-Building Activities
Finding ways to build trust and cultivate positive work relationships is one of the most challenging aspects of managing virtual teams. Although there’s no shortage of technology that allows geographically distributed team members to interact and collaborate, the barriers of distance and time differences often make it hard to create a sense of community and trust that’s essential to promote accountability.
Maximizing the Benefits of Cross-Functional Teams
Although many organizations still operate in terms of distinctly siloed functions, the trend toward flattened, more distributed structures is accelerating. Cross-functional teams play an important role in facilitating that transition, serving as an intermediary between the hierarchical decision-making practices of the past and the more dynamic strategies of the future.
5 Ways Agile Leaders Navigate a VUCA World
Originally coined by the US Army to describe the increasingly unpredictable dynamics of the post-Cold War world, the acronym VUCA has been embraced by the business world to describe the global economy of the 21st century. Each letter stands for a unique type of variable that could have a major impact on business interests around the world.
8 Tips for Improving Performance Management
According to Deloitte’s research, 58 percent of companies don’t even believe performance management is an effective use of time. It’s not surprising then that many organizations are continually updating their performance management systems in an effort to achieve better results and improve the process. Unfortunately, they often find that these efforts don’t produce the desired outcomes.
3 Innovative Companies Who are Nailing Agile Leadership
We don’t have to look far to find examples of innovation, whether it’s in the technology sector, consumer goods or manufacturing. Apple, Amazon, Spotify, The Washington Post, Square and others make the short list of the most innovative companies year after year. While pioneering a unique product or service is certainly part of the equation, what allows these companies to sustain that success over time really comes down to agile leadership.
8 red flags that an employee is itching to leave
When a once-promising staffer starts lagging in key areas, that’s a signal for you to rev up engagement. Consider these sirens and flashing lights that a worker is ready to jump ship. Your employee retention efforts can make or break your business. In the short term, the cost of losing an employee is significant—costing anywhere from 100 to 300 percent of their salary.
8 Signs an Employee is About to Quit (and What You Can Do About It)
Employee retention is absolutely vital for companies hoping to build sustainable success. In the short term, the cost of losing an employee is significant, costing anywhere between 100 to 300 percent of their salary. In the long run, high turnover can weaken succession pipelines, resulting in fewer capable, high-potential leaders who can step into a new position and perform up to expectations.
Why Onboarding Virtual Team Members is So Important
Building a successful virtual team can be a major challenge for an organization. Not only must the team have the right infrastructure and tools in place to collaborate effectively from a distance, they also need the right team members who are capable of building productive relationships and holding one another accountable. While there are many strategies and best practices for launching a successful virtual team, the work doesn’t stop there.
5 Key Elements of Successful Virtual Teamwork
Working from a distance is becoming the new normal. As travel costs continue to rise and the search for talent is no longer limited by geography, more and more companies are turning to virtual teamwork for their everyday operations. Whereas working remotely used to be an exception, the number of employees who do so less than 20 percent of the time has decreased significantly in recent years. But what differentiates the top-performing virtual teams from the weaker ones?
5 Reasons Why Companies are Turning to Agile Teams
While the agile team methodology is still largely associated with software development, this non-linear approach to project management has become a fixture of many other industries over the last decade. More versatile and faster than more linear, traditional methods, the agile process breaks large projects that would take months to complete into specific tasks that are then completed over shorter “sprint” periods (usually 1-2 weeks).
4 Tips for Planning Effective Virtual Meetings
Virtual meetings are a necessity for geographically dispersed teams that need to collaborate on projects, solve problems, and exchange vital information. One of the benefits of virtual meetings is that they allow team members to contribute ideas and work toward solutions as a group. Inefficient meetings, however, present roadblocks to productivity, wasting everyone’s time and undermining engagement.
Successful Cross-Functional Teams to Watch in 2019
What makes a cross-functional team successful? It may sound cliché, but the best multi-functional teams have the ability to put their differences aside and unite toward a common goal. This is easier said than done, particularly when a team consists of people from different departments, generations, or geographic regions.
3 Tools for Building and Sustaining Collaboration
The days of the traditional office are fast becoming a distant memory for many companies. With more than 70 percent of people working remotely at least once a week and organizational structures flattening to meet the dynamic needs of today’s economy, companies of all sizes are looking for tools to help their employees collaborate more effectively.
The Pros and Cons of Employee Incentive Programs
Incentive programs are powerful tools to motivate and engage team members. Compensation such as stock options, pensions, and bonuses push your employees towards top performance (as does their regular salary) as well as other incentives such as free or low cost meals, remote work, flex time and other work-life balance benefits. However, incentive programs can have an unintended consequence of diverting your workforce from your organization’s goals.
How to Avoid the Talent Gap in Your Business
It may sound like a cliched “truism,” but an organization really is only as good as its people. Without engaged and talented employees, companies often struggle to deliver quality business results. Unfortunately, research has indicated that only about 60 percent of employees are highly or moderately engaged.
How to Make Unbiased Decisions
Most decision makers tend to think of themselves as well-informed and objective in their approach. They may be surprised to learn, then, that smart people aren’t immune to making bad decisions. In fact, their confidence in their intellect and experience may even leave them more vulnerable to the effects of one of the leading contributors to bad decisions: bias. Simply put, a bias is a preference for one thing over another, often with little rational justification.
How to Create the Best Cross-Functional Teams
Cross-functional teams are an essential part of the ongoing effort to develop innovative and agile solutions to the problems facing modern businesses. By leveraging the diverse range of skills and resources scattered across multiple departments, organizations can build these teams to address specific issues that affect their operations. The structure and function of such teams do present some unique challenges, however.
3 Ideas to Maintain Morale & Productivity
The business world can be unforgiving. With competition becoming increasingly global and technology accelerating the pace of change, the modern workplace can leave people feeling demoralized. Unsurprisingly, declining morale has a negative impact on both individual and team performance. Disengaged employees tend to be less productive and more likely to seek new opportunities elsewhere. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way.
How The Best Leaders Master Nonverbal Communication
Nonverbal cues are an important part of effective communication. While an increasing amount of interaction in the business world is taking place in a virtual context, understanding the importance of nonverbal gestures and behaviors is still critical. Collectively, they make up a vital aspect of the soft skills that allow agile leaders to connect, adapt, and deliver in ways that impact their organizations.
Who Makes Up Generation Z in the Workplace?
There’s no shortage of advice on how to handle millennials in the workplace and this generational cohort is now the largest in the workforce. Organizations have been adapting to millennials for well over a decade and those same employees will be assuming senior leadership positions within the next few years (if they haven’t already). Forward-looking companies need to begin thinking about the next generation, which is only now beginning to enter the workplace.
How to Drive Business Results in Your Team Through Leadership
Today’s organizations understand the value of effective leadership. The numbers speak for themselves, as companies with top-tier leadership outperform the competition in terms of business performance metrics like profitability, innovation, and retention rates. No one questions that good leadership is critical to driving superior business results. But why? What is it about effective leadership that helps organizations achieve better outcomes?
4 Cross-Functional Teams Best Practices You Need to Implement
As organizations take on challenges that require increasingly innovative and agile solutions, the value of cross-functional teams is becoming more evident than ever. Bringing together the resources and skills from employees across different departments and functions, these teams are capable of delivering better and faster results if they are well-organized and managed effectively. Through teamwork and collaboration, they can become an invaluable asset to an organization.
How to Create an Agile Culture in Your Workplace
The workplace has undergone significant changes in recent years. With today’s economy moving faster than ever before, companies have been forced to adapt in order to respond quickly and effectively. Although technology has the ability to boost productivity and efficiency, few of those benefits can be realized without engaged employees to drive creativity and innovation. One solution to today’s business challenges is the concept of the agile workplace.
How to Avoid Costly Promotion Mistakes
Getting the right candidates in the right leadership positions is a huge challenge for any organization, but one that’s worth taking on. Companies with top-tier leadership outperform their competitors by 19%, are more innovative and adaptive, and have lower turnover rates. It’s somewhat surprising, then, that research has shown that companies select candidates who are not a fit for a position about 82% of the time. Unfortunately, promoting the wrong person can have serious consequences.
5 Tips for Retaining and Developing High-Potential Millennials
Born between the early 1980s and mid 1990s, the millennial generation is already the largest generation in today’s workforce. Far from just beginning their careers, most millennials have been working professionally for a decade or more, which means many of them are entering leadership positions or are assessing where they can find the best opportunities. One of the key challenges for today’s organizations is finding ways to retain and develop high-potential millennial employees.
How to Identify Your Primary Influencing Style
The ability to influence others is often the most important factor that determines whether or not someone will be successful as a leader. Understanding how you influence others is an important step in developing as a leader because it identifies tendencies and areas for potential improvement. While there are many strategies that can be deployed in various situations, the most effective leaders tend to use one of four key styles most frequently.
5 crucial virtual communication skills to cultivate
Through technology, virtual teams can take on crucial projects, but collaborating remotely requires special skills. According to Gallup data, 43 percent of people work at least some of the time in a different location from their colleagues, and 31 percent spend 80–100 percent of their time working remotely. Smartphone apps, productivity software and a variety of instant messaging platforms connect employees worldwide.
The Most Common Reason Change Initiatives Fail
Change is a difficult, but ultimately necessary part of running a successful business. With rapid advancements in technology and communication, companies must adapt faster than ever before to remain competitive. That means new ways of working and thinking to implement these changes successfully. The importance of change is widely acknowledged.
Is it Possible for Anyone to be a Leader?
Today’s organizations understand the value of leadership. Every year, companies invest billions of dollars on leadership training to identify, prepare, and develop effective leaders. With so much emphasis on leadership, it’s worth taking a step back to reassess why leaders are important for an organization, and to ask whether or not anyone can step into a leadership role successfully. One of the primary responsibilities of leaders is to set the direction for their teams.
5 Steps to Successful Succession Planning
Despite dedicating many resources toward training and development, many organizations still find themselves short-handed when it comes to effective leadership. Stunningly, a Harvard Business Review survey showed that only 15% of North American companies claimed to have a pipeline of candidates ready to assume key leadership roles.
Boost Leadership Development With Corporate Training Programs
Effective training and development programs can greatly benefit an organization, leading to higher levels of employee engagement and reduced turnover rates. Although these programs have historically been among the first items to be cut in difficult times, training budgets have been on the rise for several years.
How Cross-Functional Teams Give You a Competitive Advantage
For decades, companies adopted a hierarchical structure that echoed a military organization. In recent years, however, many companies have experimented with new approaches to a corporate structure that eliminates the traditional barriers between decision-makers and employees. With today’s business demands forcing companies to be nimble and react faster than ever before, cross-functional teams have become one of their most widely adopted strategies.
How to Implement Strategic Leadership in Your Organization
Organizations with effective leaders sometimes find themselves in the difficult position of meeting their day-to-day objectives without making much progress towards the organization’s strategic goals. Perhaps they’re covering their expenses without making a significant profit, or maybe they’re keeping customers satisfied without expanding their business. They’re in no danger of failing, but they’re not where they want to be or where they could be.
The Role of Culture in Recruiting and Retaining Talent
Finding and hiring the best person for a job is a difficult task. The first challenge is simply finding qualified candidates who will be able to handle the position’s basic responsibilities. While evaluating applicants on the basis of skills and experience is hard enough, recruiters need to take their organization’s culture into consideration as well. Even the most capable candidate can turn out to be a disastrous hire if they’re not a good cultural fit.
Driving Better Business Performance Through Employee Engagement
There’s no question that companies with highly engaged employees are more successful. Gallup research found that teams with engaged employees performed better in terms of customer ratings, profitability, and productivity with much lower turnover and absenteeism rates. Companies with an average of 9.3 engaged employees for every actively disengaged employee not only had higher earnings, but also recovered from market-induced setbacks faster than companies with lower ratios.
The Pros and Cons of 360-Degree Feedback
Many organizations have incorporated 360-degree feedback into their leadership development process, and for good reason. The data gathered from multi-source feedback can be extremely valuable both for organizations and the employees, providing honest and measurable observations that can be used to enhance employee development, as well as engagement and retention. Making the decision to use 360 feedback is not something that should be done casually or without forethought, however.
5 Highly Effective Virtual Communication Skills
Technology has opened up a wide range of options for organizations using virtual teams to tackle their biggest projects. Smartphone apps, productivity software, and a variety of instant messaging options have made it possible to connect employees around the world, regardless of their geographic location. More than ever before, companies can assign their most important tasks to their best people and redirect workflow on the fly, enhancing productivity and responsiveness.
Influencing People: How to Do It the Right Way
Influencing is the ability to change someone’s behavior, attitude, or perspective. Every member of an organization will, sooner or later, have to influence others to get them to commit to a course of action. For example, leaders may need to convince team members to take on new responsibilities, or one member of a team might need to ask a colleague for help to successfully complete a project.
The 4 Most Common Leadership Training Mistakes
It’s well-known that effective leadership is crucial for success at all levels of an organization. In fact, past data from the CEB Corporate Leadership Council shows that companies with top-tier leadership teams outperform others by nearly 19%. Weak or below-average leadership, on the other hand, can cause significant harm to an organization over time. For example, poor leadership contributes to high employee turnover, low morale, and a lack of collaboration.
How to Build Agile Leaders
Leadership agility, or how well a leader can balance all of the challenges they face to achieve their objectives, has consistently remained one of the key leadership differentiators among the companies OnPoint has worked with. Agile leadership helps companies navigate the challenges of creating effective processes, helping people achieve peak performance, and encouraging innovation and change.
4 Ways to Quickly & Easily Improve Virtual Meetings
Inefficient meetings are roadblocks to productivity. Beyond wasting the time of everyone in attendance, a bad meeting can sap otherwise productive employees of their commitment to their work—leaving them thinking: “Why do I need to even be here?” The challenges of running an effective meeting are multiplied for virtual meetings.
Flexible Leadership Calls for Both Leadership and Management
There is a great deal of interest in the subject of leadership—the sheer number of books published on this topic is proof of this fact. However, despite the amount that has been written, there is still a controversy about the difference between leadership and management and whether one is more important than another.
Choosing the Right Organizational Development Consultant: 7 Tips
As businesses grow, changes may need to be made to accommodate new departments, geographically diverse teams, and teams that combine different business functions to be more adaptable. Organizational development consultants can help businesses improve their change management, leadership development programs, and overall team effectiveness.
Flexible Leadership: Responding to Changing Demands
The ability to manage change effectively is one of the five critical factors needed for effective execution. Yet, many organizations struggle with change management.
What’s Missing in Leadership Development Programs Today?
In many organizations, there is a lack of energy and excitement about “leadership development” and training in general. This leads to a lack of focus and engagement that can reduce the ROI that companies see from leadership development programs. The cause, we believe, is that a few elements are missing from these programs; guidelines and best practices that, if present, can help companies ensure that their development programs are engaging and valuable to their employees.
3 Reasons Virtual Leadership is Training Better Than In-Person Training?
Is virtual leadership training better than the real thing? It’s clear more organizations are using virtual training for a variety of reasons. It’s more efficient, cost-effective and scalable, which is especially important for large and geographically dispersed companies. But is it really more effective? I’d argue there are many situations when it is. Here are just three of them. The most effective training is practical and reflective of the real-world environment.
6 Things Leaders Are Doing to Get Employees Engaged
All around the world, businesses struggle to engage their employees. According to a global survey cited by Forbes, “less than one-quarter of employees are highly engaged and 39% are moderately engaged. Low levels of engagement among employees contributes to decreased customer satisfaction, slower revenue growth, high turnover, high absenteeism rates, and a myriad of other issues that negatively impact day-to-day operations as well as the bottom line.
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