Blog | Organizational Culture Definition, Characteristics, Types, and Examples | Conversation About Leadership and Teamwork | What is Psychological Safety | Strategic Planning in Uncertain Times - Kadabra

Is Your HR Staff Overcompensating for You?

Visualize leadership as your favorite muscle group—in my case, quadriceps. Under a certain amount of repetitive stress and pressure, in the form of difficult decisions and conversations, it grows and strengthens. Remove any stress and/or pressure for too long, and it tends to atrophy from disuse.

Unfortunately, too many leaders find handy excuses to continue doing just that. They avoid difficult conversations and challenging people-related decisions in favor of delegating these tasks to HR staff. And, while many HR professionals are incredibly skillful in picking up the slack, that habit doesn’t always serve them, their organizations, or the leaders they are picking up the slack for, well in the long run.

4 Paradigm Shifts for Today’s Leaders

We expect leaders to behave very differently today than we did yesterday. That’s because the problems we’re solving today are different from the ones we were solving yesterday.

Today’s leaders need to unlearn what their role models taught them and replace that with a whole new set of mindsets, skill sets, and behaviors. Unlike previous generations of leaders, it’s not enough to simply follow the example their role models may have set. It’s time for a shift in paradigms for leaders who want to be successful now and into the future.

Improving DEIB Alongside Organizational Change

Organizational change is the process by which companies or other organizations change the way they operate, use technologies, are structured from a people perspective, and adapt to changes in the market.

Essentially, if your organization is in any kind of flux state related to people, products, or operations, you’re dealing with organizational change. And in order to remain relevant, you should have your radar tuned to early signs that a change could benefit the organization.

Three Reasons Leaders Need Coaching in 2021

Many organizational leaders view leadership coaching as a one-off type of investment. It’s expensive, they think, and besides, even if it might be helpful, between a global pandemic, racial reckoning, tons of people resigning, and a lower than typical number of job applicants responding to fill new vacancies, who has time for that right now?

Unfortunately, this is the wrong conclusion to support organizational success today. There are three primary reasons your return on investment (in terms of both time and money) for leadership coaching has never been higher than right now.

Evolving Your Business Ecosystem

All businesses today operate within one or more recognizable ecosystems. Ecosystems look like patterns of regular exchanges between individuals and organizations through which they acquire new customers (lead generation), generate revenue (selling products and services), and reduce their operating expenses (outsourcing, automation, and fractional work arrangements). Exchanges can be information-based, currency-based, or relational. All three types of exchanges can be valuable contributors to your business’s success.

Barriers to Organizational Change: The Role of Culture

I’ve been talking to a lot of people lately about their return to office plans. Returning to the office is a major organizational change after 15 months of working from home for most of us.

The people I’m talking to are fairly well dialed in on the tactical, practical aspects. They’ve thought through vaccination status, PPE stations, masks, and social distancing protocols. But they often haven’t thought about what this return might mean for their culture. Most of them don’t have a good read on what their employees think about returning to the office. It got me thinking about the role of curating culture during organizational change. In the case of this particular change, I think it’s important to focus on communicating early, often, and generously.

Conversations Around Your Organizational Culture

Every organization has a culture, whether the leadership team has tried to build it intentionally or not. That culture sets the tone for everything that happens within the organization, from who is hired and how people are rewarded and retained to customer satisfaction and ultimately, profit. The good news is you do have a choice to build yours intentionally.

Changing the Conversation About Leadership

Look closely anywhere in corporate America, the government, and even sports and you’ll realize: we haven’t had enough great leadership in the past…and we don’t have enough now. It’s time to change the way we talk about leaders, how we perceive people’s readiness to lead, and how we encourage the behaviors we want to see all leaders demonstrate in the future.

We are Better Together

At Kadabra, our team has an unofficial mantra: “We’re better together.” I don’t remember who said it first, but every time we put our heads together to solve a problem, work on content, or do strategic planning, we affirm that we are certainly better together.

It’s more than the old adage that two heads are better than one. There’s a synergy that happens when we work together. It’s as if, together, we’re able to tap into a higher wisdom; like Napoleon Hill’s concept of the mastermind principle.

What Being More, Doing More Really Means

Many of us have heard the story of Dan Price, the CEO who made headlines by cutting his own salary so he could raise his lowest-paid employees to a minimum salary of $70k a year.

People said his company would go under. Others said that he set an unrealistic precedent. Many said he was crazy.

In a country where the CEO of large organizations typically make 1200x more than their lowest-paid employee, we’d argue that Price epitomizes being more, doing more.