Organizational agility is one of the key trends in almost all areas of management. Most of the available knowledge about when to apply an agile approach and how to apply it is related to product development. However, there is much more to organizational agility than the well-known product development tools such as SCRUM and Kanban. Especially in an environment characterized by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA), an agile approach is your first choice. In this blog we provide you with a practical guide that helps you decide when an agile approach makes sense for your team, organization or project, as well as with tips on what you should consider when you want to apply such an approach.
Research findings across a variety of industries and organizations indicate that a strong management team is a key ingredient of organizational performance. While this claim might sound straight-forward, recent examples from the corporate and public sector show that it is incredibly difficult to build and develop a management team that functions well. In this blog post, we take a look at six signs of an ineffective management team that threatens organizational performance in this article.
Bold decisions that drastically change what is taken for granted have always been traits of leaders that attract and inspire people. The rise of social media and other means of online communication such as blogs, online communities and intranets allow leaders to spread bold ideas and big plans easier than ever before to their target audience and the wider public. On the one hand, this tremendous speed of communication is a powerful lever to mobilize people and initiate change on a level and magnitude never seen before. On the other hand, change is always accompanied with unintended consequences that backfire, if not handled properly.
Soft skills also called people or management skills get increasingly important in our 21st knowledge economy. In contrast to many hard skills, management skills cannot be substituted by technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and search engines. This is reflected in an ever growing demand for online and face to face management training programs. As a result, hundreds of millions of Euros are invested in management training activities every year. However, only a small fraction of the training content is transfered back on the job (Griffin, 2011) or adds value to the training participants. Drawing and theory and science, we derive six criteria you should look for when selecting a good management training program.
Have you already completed your organization’s agile transformation? Where do you apply SCRUM in your organization? Agility and agile frameworks such as SCRUM are the new Holy Grail for private and public sector organizations. As a manager and professional you might wonder whether you should jump on the agility bandwagon, or whether it is just another management fad you can confidently ignore. We take a closer look at the scientific foundation of agility and one of the most popular agile frameworks called SCRUM in this blog post.
Management trainings are an important part of most corporate training programs. However, in a VUCA world, organizations are more and more starting to move from a management training to a management learning approach. We have a look at the shortcomings of traditional management learning and introduce a new approach of management learning that puts emphasis on knowledge quality (evidence), applicability in daily business (context) and adaptability (agility). We do this from a knowledge worker's point of view during an product introduction project.
Leadership skills are somehow seen as magic skills only relevant for a executives, senior managers and CEOs. We argue that this understanding of leadership is outdated and that leadership skills are important for every professional and knowledge worker. After that, we have a look at what leadership is all about and we discuss five reasons why you should start to build your leadership skills today.
In two sessions, we interviewed Eric Barends, the Managing Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management (CEBMa). Eric is based in Amsterdam (Netherlands) and advises management teams and boards of companies and non-profit organizations on evidence-based management and development. In our first interview Eric provides an overview about the benefits of evidence-based management in business. In session two we have a look at the origin of evidence-based management, why evidence-based managers rely on fours sources of evidence and that not all evidence is created equal.
In two sessions, we interviewed Eric Barends, the Managing Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management (CEBMa). Eric is based in Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and advises management teams and boards of companies and non-profit organizations on evidence-based management and development. In this first session Eric discusses the foundation of evidence-based management and its benefits in business.
The capability to lead and influence people is essential for success even beyond management. Professionals without a formal leadership role find themselves more and more often in situations where it is key to deliberately influence people, teams, divisions or the whole organization. Thus despite – or perhaps precisely because of its great relevance, leadership is often seen as something mystic. This impression is reinforced by a large number of popular business bestsellers about leadership, CEO biographies, and executive consultants who rely on individual experiences and anecdotal evidence when writing and talking about leadership. These sources generally provide only a limited informative value and therefore are of questionable use for the development of leaders and professionals.
