Grit – the exceptional stamina that individuals demonstrate to achieve high performance – is the topic of a recent article* in Harvard Business Review. People strong in grit are always striving to improve, make the sacrifices necessary to achieve, and remain in love with what they do. Research shows that grit predicts high performance in a variety of domains. Given the … [Read more...] about Building Organizational Grit
culture
Building a Learning Culture
Technology continues to rapidly change the skills we need in the workplace to be successful. Coming applications of Artificial Intelligence is just going to speed that up. There is no way that your team or organization will meet its mission goals in the future if you do not have “learning” as a key part of your culture. A recent Harvard Business Review article* suggests … [Read more...] about Building a Learning Culture
Engaged & Exhausted
Employee engagement is the current Holy Grail for organizations. Many employers – including my own, the University of Maryland – are spending millions of dollars to assess employee engagement and implement programs to increase engagement. Given the research on the payoff of having an engaged workforce, these investments make sense (e.g., see extensive research by Gallup). … [Read more...] about Engaged & Exhausted
Conduct a Premortem
We’ve all seen the TV docs do a postmortem to figure out why and how a victim died so the NCIS detectives can catch the bad guy. A lot of organizations will conduct a postmortem after a big event or project has concluded to do an evaluation (though I prefer an After Action Review, since I hope no one died while implementing the project). Research has demonstrated … [Read more...] about Conduct a Premortem
Building Your Bench
Staff turnover is a fact of life – as much as you might want to use your wishful thinking to make it go away. Once you have accepted that fact of life – now it is time to prepare for it. Here are some things you can do to be prepared to successfully navigate the departure of key staff: *Identify possible successors – internally and externally. Even if your organization … [Read more...] about Building Your Bench