Innholdsfortegnelse for Rotman Management Leader's Digest Issue: Thriving i Rotman Management

A thriving workforce is one in which employees and their leaders are not just satisfied and productive: they are engaged in creating the future — both the organization’s and their own. Never satisfied with the status quo, thriving individuals create resources and actively seek opportunities to learn new things and develop. What organization couldn’t use more people like that? In this inaugural Leader’s Digest, we present the best thinking on thriving from Rotman Management magazine, and show what leaders can do to enable more of it in their workplace. Articles include “CoachingHigh Performance” by Roger Martin and renowned tennis coach Bob Brett; “Navigating the Realm of the High-Potential Employee” by Douglas Ready; “Neuroleadership 101”, an interview with David Rock; and Q&As with London Business School Professor Lynda Gratton and former…

Research shows that the brain requires three things to function optimally. What are they? The first is moderate stress. People tend to think we need low stress to function at our best, but that isn’t true. Most problems related to poor performance arise when people are already at a moderate level of stress, and they suddenly experience very high stress. The second requirement for optimal brain functioning is positive affect, or emotion, which creates the right neurochemistry for our conscious and non-conscious processes to function at their best. If you experience negative emotions consistently, your cortisol levels will be too high, and you won’t experience the healing effects of positive emotions to recuperate. The third factor is a good night’s sleep, which is critical. For some of us, that means…

ONE OF OUR COLLEAGUES recently went on a family camping trip to an isolated area along the Alabama-Florida border. The family had never been camping before, and the small children were extremely excited about the adventure that lay ahead. But when they arrived at the campsite, they realized that they had no instructions for building their brand new tent. As the kids began to pull the many bits and pieces out of the tent’s carrying case, the magnitude of the problem became clear: 50 puzzle pieces, two small children, no instructions, and half of the poles looked identical. One by one, our colleague and her husband started trying to fit pieces together to build the tent frame. As the sun began to set, trial and error paid off: the bag…

You believe the key difference between successful executives and those who are less successful is the way they deal with periods of confusion and uncertainty. Please explain. Some people are under the impression that highly-successful leaders enjoy a smooth path, but that is not the case. Every executive — no matter how successful — goes through difficult periods: they experience adversity, failure and disappointments. The trick is not to avoid those things completely, it’s to learn how to deal with them. And the best way to deal with them is not to pretend that you have all the answers. You have to be able to step back on a regular basisand ask questions — the right questions — and reflect in order to get yourself back on track. You have…

Why is it so important for today’s leaders to embrace the concept of flextime? The passing of a demographic milestone in the U.S. — women comprising fully half of the workforce – has renewed calls for updating the structure of work to meet the needs of the 21st century family. The availability of flexible work schedules, or flextime, is one tool that is critical to addressing the challenges families confront. In fact, it has been the most widely adopted work-family practice among medium and large private-sector employers. Can you describe some of the key benefits of flextime? Broadly defined, flextime is the ability to schedule flexible starting and quitting times, and research shows that this has positive effects on employees: it is associated with an increase in job satisfaction, a…

OVER THE PAST 20 YEARS, we have seen dramatic interest in building sustainable organizations that have the capacity to endure and simultaneously satisfy a triple bottom line of economic, environmental and human performance. Yet, in comparison to the environmental and economic dimensions, substantially less attention has been paid to sustainability’s human dimension. An important mechanism for understanding the human dimension of sustainability is the concept of thriving at work. When thriving, employees are energized to grow and develop, and are creating resources rather than merely depleting resources. In this article, we will describe what it means to thrive and what leaders can do to enable more thriving in the workplace. What It Means to Thrive Thriving individuals are growing, developing and energized, as opposed to stagnating. In workplace terms, thriving…

You have said that an ‘enormous vacuum’ exists in leadership today. Please explain. I refer to the last 10 years as ‘leadership’s lost decade’. It all started with Enron and Worldcom, two of the first large companies to have, shall we say, ‘ethical lapses’; then we hit the crisis of 2008, where countless leaders seemingly put their heads down and focused on personal gain, not bothering to think about the bigger picture. As a result of all this, public trust in business is at its lowest level in 50 years; and in business, trust is everything. I think a lot of the bad behaviour emerged from having the wrong definition of leadership — an image of the all-powerful leader at the top of an organization, and a top-down, hierarchical approach.…

LEVELS OF STRESS, EXHAUSTION, AND BURNOUT have become increasingly problematic for employees and organizations alike. Understanding how people recover from the demands of work is therefore increasingly important, and is directing a burgeoning area of research in Organizational Behaviour and Workplace Psychology. Work recovery is typically measured as ‘achieving lowered levels of stress and increased well-being’. When recovery is successful, an employee’s well-being improves, and resources drawn upon during the ‘strain process’ are restored. A key area of focus to date has been the study of breaks from work, which include vacations, weekends and end-of-day activities, in relation to job performance, exhaustion and well-being. Until recently research in this area has generally ignored employee behaviour during the work day — which is surprising, considering that people spend anywhere from one…

WHENEVER WE SPEAK to business people these days, they tell us that the current speed, breadth and depth of change is greater than anything they have previously experienced. Uncertainty, ambiguity and turbulence have become the hallmarks of our economic environment, leaving our leaders with the daunting challenge of making sense of the world. Questions being asked include, ‘How is the world changing and what might it look like in the future?’; ‘What implications does this have for our business?’; And, perhaps most difficult of all, ‘What, if anything, should we be doing to respond?’ The shift towards a business environment characterized by rapid change and discontinuities calls for some specific capabilities that are not readily apparent in many of today’s leaders. In turbulent environments, data and analyzed information are either…

Let’s start at the beginning: How do you define a ‘high-potential employee’? A good rule of thumb is that ‘HiPos’ represent the top three-to- five per cent of your organization’s workforce on two key dimensions: performance and living the company’s values. These individuals consistently and significantly outperform their peers in a variety of settings and circumstances, and at the same time, they ‘live’ the culture. The HiPo title doesn’t automatically come with a big promotion; it’s a label that is earned over time. Companies hire people that exhibit a ‘fit’ with their values; but as people move up the hierarchy and into the high-potential cadre, it’s no longer enough to fit with the values: you have to begin to role model the values, and eventually, to actually teach them. You…

IN MODERN ORGANIZATIONS, the mindful management of talent —highly-creative, uniquely-skilled, value-producing individuals — is an absolute necessity. High-performing players, whether they be star CEOs, world-class salespeople, great product developers or professional services rainmakers, exist at the tail end of the distribution in terms of ability and impact. They have high aptitude, sought-after skills and the ability to ply their trade almost anywhere around the globe. How can a leader take a brilliant, talented individual and bring out his or her very best, sustained performance? Great sports coaches — like Harry Hopman in tennis, Bill Walsh in football or Mike Krzyzewski in college basketball — are prime exemplars. They are able to draw outstanding performance from individuals and to create a legacy of sustained excellence. But how do the lessons from…

What does it mean to ‘Glow’ in the workplace? People who Glow have mastered three distinct areas of their lives: they have built deeply trusting and cooperative relationships with others; they have extended their networks beyond the obvious to encompass the unusual; and they are on an inner quest that ignites their own energy and that of others. When you Glow, you are able to create or find and flourish in what I call ‘Hot Spots’. These are times, places and occasions when whole groups or communities become highly energized and innovative. The challenge for us all is to learn how to Glow and then create, find and flourish in Hot Spots. You recommend that we ask ourselves some key question on a regular basis. Which ones? Wherever you are…

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, we had an especially prolific creative director at Ziba, the design consultancy where I serve as director. Her uncanny ability to generate concepts that no one else could see made her extremely valuable, and won us client after client through the sheer abundance and frequency of her ideas. She also had trouble completing projects. Those same clients she bowled over with creativity and insight grew increasingly frustrated by missed deadlines and blown budgets — not just occasionally, but on nearly every single project under her control. Around that time, a smart young intern at the studio was promoted to full-time project manager, and paired on a new client project with that brilliant-but-challenging creative director. Almost immediately, things went differently. Together, they hit deadlines, stayed within budget, and…

IN A HIGHLY-CONNECTED WORLD, peripheral signals are initially difficult to capture, but they can be vital early warning signs of both threats and opportunities. Unfortunately, most of us are ‘passive scanners’ of our environment: we wait for information to reach us, and deal with it as it arrives. The danger in this practice is that it is all-too easy to miss unexpected and unfamiliar weak signals on the periphery — that blurry zone at the edge of our vision, where not many people or firms focus their attention. Active scanning, in contrast, typically occurs in response to a specific question and is driven by organizational curiosity. The primary zones of the periphery that should be scanned on a regular basis include the macro-economic and political zones; customers and channels; competitors…

Congratulations: you’ve made the high-potential list! You are nowon HR’s radar and are about to be sucked into the machinery of your company’s accelerated development system. The centerpiece of this likely involves some kind of rotation – a ‘better than random walk’ through a series of assignments designed to test your mettle, provide you with a macro view of the firm and prepare you for top management positions. But before you commence your ascent, consider four traps that can derail even the most promising career. Trap #1: The HiPo Label. Don’t expect a big welcome. Whether the HiPo program is public or not, people can figure out for themselves that you are being parachuted-in and that you are expected to go on to bigger things. This is not exactlyan incentive…