Many companies boast about their cultures of innovation. They incorporate creativity and openness into their mission or values statements. They reward employees for new insights and ideas. They hire and promote for innovation. Yet despite such measures, they find that their teams remain stubbornly locked in place, struggling to generate new ideas and to execute even minor change initiatives.
Is your company stormproof?
The storm I’m talking about isn’t a tornado or hurricane, but rather a “perfect storm” in the battle for talent. A tightening labor market combined with baby boomer retirements is adding up to significant talent gaps at many companies. Younger workers are often not ready to take over in leadership positions. Meanwhile, they are becoming frustrated with perceived shortfalls in the leadership development opportunities available at many companies.
Have you heard about Adobe’s Kickbox? It’s a little red box filled with materials that take employees through a six-step, self-guided innovation process. Employees who have a new idea they want to pursue take a workshop and then proceed through the stages of innovation on their own. Each box contains a credit card with $1000 in seed money.
You’ve heard it a thousand times. How athletes use positive self-talk to eliminate pre-game jitters and improve their performance on the field.
What if we told you that self-talk is a powerful tool in business too? By modifying one simple habit you can flip a switch in your brain and improve the quality of your decision-making and subsequent on-the-job performance.
Skeptical? Stay with us on this one. Researchers across disciplines are discovering new insights on what many consider conventional wisdom: how we talk to ourselves can truly make a difference in how we behave.
Nationally known voice on generational differences in the workplace Kim Huggins, was recently interviewed by Generis (an organizer of business summits including the American Manufacturing Summit) on the topic of Leading A Multi Generational Workforce in Manufacturing.
We’re all too familiar with the shift in buzzwords and industry jargon over time. Words such as “customer-centric” “big data,” and “innovative” are sure to grab our attention today, whereas “paradigm shift,” “synergy,” and “bandwidth” were hot terms in the past.
“Behavior” and its derivatives—such as “behavior change” and “behavior-based solution”—could be joining the race for buzzword status. If you’ve been looking for a behavior-based solution for your organization, or even on a personal level, you may already be familiar with the plethora of popular behavior-change books and articles, all of which include models from the various “experts.” More likely, you’re probably familiar with the inherent difficulty involved in actually creating sustainable behavior change.
Companies pay millions each year to researchers and consultants to help them understand employees in various generational cohorts. Yet some observers have begun to ask whether companies are going too far, and whether generational divisions are overblown, if they exist at all (see New York Times article Oh, to Be Young, Millennial, and So Wanted by Marketers)
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