Business Leadership
A few months ago, I saw a piece of research which has stuck with me. Research by Microsoft was looking into how Hybrid Work was working, and found out the following shocking statistic: 87% of employees feel like they are just as productive working remotely as they are in the office But 88% of managers [...]
If you want something done, give it to a busy person. I remember this quote from my childhood, and it is meant to show that people who work the hardest are likely to be the ones who are best able to complete additional hard tasks. Since then, there has been an explosion of the productivity [...]
A new survey of 20,000 by Microsoft shows how little trust most managers have in their teams. When asked "Do you feel productive when you work remotely?”, 87% of workers said they felt as productive or more productive working remotely than in the office. Yet when managers were asked "Do you have confidence that your [...]
Do you know what is happening in your business? Not what is supposed to happen, but what is actually happening on the factory floor? For many managers and leaders, it may have been a while since they actually experienced what it is like where the action happens. Where the products they sell are manufactured, or [...]
Is your team having too many meetings? Do you ever come to the end of a workday and feel stressed because instead of getting any productive work done, you have spent nearly the whole day in back-to-back meetings? Ben Laker and his team recently conducted some research across 76 companies into the impact of reducing [...]
Some innovation teams and creatives seem to never want to let go of their favorite ideas, even after they have proven that they are not going anywhere.Yet there are also individuals and teams who have the opposite problem.They may start on one idea, yet before they can make meaningful progress, or especially when things begin [...]
Permission is given. Responsibility is taken. If you want to be a leader for change, and enable creativity in your teams, you need to take responsibility of what they might come up with. That also involves taking responsibility and ownership for the impact the change might bring. Both positive and negative. This is why so [...]
If you work in a team, you may have heard me talk about the importance of Psychological Safety before. Developed by Professor Amy Edmondson, it is a principle which shows a team that they can speak up when things are not going well, and foster a culture of collaboration and progress on challenging tasks. While [...]
We already thought of that, and it didn't work. How often I have heard that statement from teams when we have discussed potential new innovation ideas. It is often repeated by people who have been in the organisation longer, and who may have had a similar idea previously. They mean it as a warning to [...]
Often when I am giving workshops or keynotes around creativity, especially in a corporate setting, I will ask the participants to anonymously vote on whether they are creative or not. You would be surprised how many people believe that they are not creative. And a series of surveys by Adobe in 2012 and 2016 show [...]
