Blog posts on respect for people

Posts selected fromManagement Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog and other blogs

• Focus on Customers and Employees

  I believe it is the purpose of organization to serve many stakeholders(customer, employees, stockholders, community…). Thankfully some companies agree: Compensation at Whole Foods – Starbucks: Respect for Workers... Here is another example – How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart...

  I am happy to invest in companies where all stakeholders are winning – I think that is a great long term strategy...

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• The Joy of Work

  We spend much of our life at work: we deserve to have pride in what we do and even enjoy it (shocking I know). Read the respect for people posts for some ideas on how to make your workplace better.

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• Respect for People – Understanding Psychology

  I see building improvement capacity of the organization, which largely means building the capacity of the people, as an extremely important focus of improvement efforts. It is, at times, important to slow down the pace of change to ensure that people can adopt and incorporate the new concepts fully. If not, the improvements tend to only take effect on the surface.

  Improvements in results are important but it is also critical to have management improvement concepts adopted as the natural way of doing business.

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• Communicating Change

  I believe the best way to communicate such changes is to explain how they tie into the long term vision of the organization. This requires that such a vision actually exists (which is often not the case). Then all strategies are communicated based on how they support and integrate with that vision. In addition that communication strategy incorporates an understanding about what weaknesses with past practices are addressed by this new strategy...

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• Interview of Bill Hunter, Brian Joiner and Peter Scholtes on Better Management Practices

  That kind of experience could not have happened if management wasn’t willing to listen to the workers and wasn’t willing to say to the workers “you have brains and you have ideas and why don’t you go out and see if you can solve it and I will back you up. And that is what they did

  Bill on creating jobs people want to do:

  If they are going to work with the attitude that part of my job is to figure out how we can make things work better around here it adds another challenge to the job which makes the work more fun and more enjoyable. It all points in the same direction it seems to me. These methods do feed into making jobs more interesting and morale going up and the job being better.

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• How to Successfully Lead Change Efforts

  In order to lead efforts to improve the management of an organization understanding how people will react to change is critical. For that reason I have written about change management often on this blog since I started publishing it in 2004.

  In, Why Do People Fail to Adopt Better Management Methods?, I wrote:

  It seems that if there were better ways to manage, people would adopt those methods. But this just isn’t the case; sometimes better methods will be adopted but often they won’t. People can be very attached to the way things have always been done. Or they can just be uncomfortable with the prospect of trying something new.

  Leading change efforts requires paying attention to the existing conditions: the culture, the motivation to adopt this change and/or the motivation to resist it, the history of change where the change is being attempted and the reasons the change is desired (by at least you and hopefully others). And then you need to build a case for the change and manage the process.

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• Deming on Management: Psychology

  Within Deming’s SoPK the psychology component includes an appreciation of:

  • how will people are influenced by management policies (for example, targets or a culture of blaming individuals)
  • the innate desire people have to take pride in their work
  • how people resist change (and how to reduce that resistance)
  • confirmation bias (one way our brains can lead us astray)
  • what drives people to behave as they do
  • and much more - continue reading the rest of the post to learn more...

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• Human Resources in the Post Deming Era

  There are many ways in which the management of our organizations needs to improve (understanding how to use data effectively, systems thinking…) and one of those important areas is in managing people. Managers spend far too little time learning about the existing conditions the people in the organization face, coaching those employees and working on improving the management system to help employees do great work.

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• Bill Hunter and the Quality Movement

  In the presentation George Box discusses interesting student design of experiments projects; read more on those efforts in 101 Ways to Design an Experiment, or Some Ideas About Teaching Design of Experiments.

  ...

  George's closing statement:

  We carry in our hearts the inspiring memory of not only a scholar but a man that was resourceful, warm, skillful, courageous, optimistic, helpful, enterprising and generous. His career was whole and balanced in a way that is rare and as we grieve his death we also celebrate the life of a remarkable man.

   

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• IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure?

  ... the main problem is poor management.

  So what should managers do? Read the Curious Cat Management Blog and follow the advise in our previous posts, including: Stop Demotivating Employees (IT employees are especially disdainful of pointy haired boss actions that others tolerate more easily) – Signs You Have a Great Job … or Not – Joy in Work for IT – hiring silicon valley style...

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