At August’s Innovation Day, KnowledgeBrief clients discussed the latest ideas in the world of management innovation and identified three priorities for action right now. Here’s a summary.
Develop Employees’ Key Strengths for Motivation and Productivity
Often, we concentrate on employees’ job descriptions when building teams or achieving tasks. However, finding out what additional strengths your employees have and focusing on developing these key skills, rather than trying to fill in the gaps, could release an enormous potential for growth and productivity. Empathy and trust are essential tools to learn why people work in a particular way and what their personal aspirations are. Honing these existing additional strengths could not only benefit specific tasks but improve the team overall. Give your employees the freedom to go work on their skills, and they will experience motivation to put themselves forward.
Fundamentally, organisations domesticate people – they condition people to work in a certain way, and they inadvertently perpetuate the status quo. Too often, CEOs say they’re looking to promote talent but end up promoting familiarity. Becoming a talent factory isn’t about hiring or promoting the best people, it is about understanding the DNA of your social system, and building from that baseline. Understanding your social system and the people who thrive in it is exponentially more valuable, particularly if you want to drive high performance1.
Give People Space to do Deep Work and Deep Thinking
Do we forget to embrace and support uninterrupted thinking? Many companies have open plan offices. This is great for fostering idea sharing, synergy, cross-functional working and cross-skill collaboration. But how about the capacity to perform deep work and intense focus? More and more employees are knowledge workers, but the ability and space to do deep work is becoming increasingly rare. To ensure the best results, both in terms of quality and quantity, it is crucial for a company to create environments that support varied workspaces, including giving people space to think.
According to a professor at Wharton, learning how to do “deep work” is among the most valuable skills people can learn, and carries wider implications for economic growth. For employees to produce at their peak level they need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimises your employees’ performance is deep work. If they’re not comfortable going deep for extended periods of time, it’ll be difficult to get their performance to the peak levels of quality and quantity that is increasingly necessary to thrive professionally. The study shows, that in most cases, deep workers will out-produce everyone else2.
Does Articulating Your Corporate Values Matter?
Core values are the deeply ingrained principles that guide all of a company’s actions; they serve as its cultural cornerstones. The importance of corporate values cannot be overstated. But rather then serving as guiding principles, confusion underlies many values initiatives. How do we ensure that the organisation and employees “live” the values? How do we know that our actions are aligned with the company values? Traditionally, there has been a clear separation between the processes of strategy creation and execution. Strategy is created by a small set of executives and then passed down through the organisation to be translated and implemented. Hence, “living” the values can be even more difficult for frontline staff. Break down the values and match what works with the different functions.
Business organisations are complex social groups, with many things that they would consider important, core, and valuable to their functioning. It is likely that not all of these values are in perfect harmony. While companies don’t usually have an exhaustive list of values, a former study shows that those companies espousing “a few more” values perform better than those espousing “a few less”. This is not to be taken as meaning that creating a long list of values is the answer. Companies need to wrestle with their cultures to make a difference. Companies who do more than a bare minimum in articulating their values may also be those that are more actively wrestling with the complexity that is an organisation culture3.
Sources: 1Warner, T. (2016) 3 Reasons Why Talent Management Isn’t Working Anymore, HBR, Jul 5; 2Newport, C. (2016) Deep Work: The Secret to Achieving Peak Productivity, KaW, Jan 12; 3Galunic, C. (2015) Does Articulating Your Corporate Values Matter?, IK, Jul 15