When you hear the word “management”, which pictures come to mind? It is likely the response is a middle-aged male in a corporate setting who makes decisions about what others are meant to do. However, this does not reflect how organizations run in practice. In the real world, professionals are those who practice management on a daily basis – in meetings, in projects, in sales, in production. Management does not refer to the top-down act of organizing people and processes. Management rather consists of a set of soft skills expected from professionals of any level nowadays, despite the misleading name. Acquiring these soft skills makes work more fulfilling, be in line with the organizational vision and equips workers to succeed in the rapidly changing world of work.
This CQ Dossier focuses on agile leadership, the principles underpinning it, and ways to implement agile leadership in practice. Learn how agility leadership ties into organizational practice relating to leadership, teamwork, processes and strategic tools and how to implement it for your benefit.
The outbreak of Covid-19 is putting the globalized world before an unprecedented challenge. Individuals, organizations, entire countries are struggling to get through the crisis and to salvage what is owned amidst insecurity on many levels. Arguably, the economy will be one of the biggest open questions to deal with in the coming weeks: what is the future of work? What will organizations look like in the future? How can we become more resilient and mitigate the crisis?While there are no answers – and by no means any simple answers – to these questions, it is possible to take a careful look at what the crisis has shown us until now and to derive some lessons learnt that could help us plan ahead for the future. While we will focus on lessons that have to do with organizations and management, bear in mind that many areas of life need to be managed on a day-to-day basis.
There is much to learn about how professionals and organizations can effectively weather the storm during a crisis such as the current Covid-19 pandemic. Organizational resilience and the practices associated with fostering it are key to managing disruption.
This CQ Dossier describes the merits and shortcomings of high-performance work practices (HPWPs), explains why they matter, and gives recommendations on how they can be implemented in practice.
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.
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.
From a practitioner’s point of view, academic disciplines especially from the social sciences may at first sight not seem relevant to the daily practice of administering and leading a firm. However, the field of sociology (or the study of society, social institutions and social relationships) is extremely influential and useful for business management.
