It’s time to do a little year-end reflecting on my blog posts from 2012.
Throughout last year I used this blog to illuminate important leadership and management issues. The topics ranged from creating a learning culture to increasing employee engagement to improving organizational communication to evaluating executive coaching, and more.
Out of all of these blog posts I’ve selected five that seem to have had the most interest for readers. Here are the links with a short excerpt from each post:
How to Create a Learning Culture in Organizations - Organizational learning is not about training. Rather,
it's about a community of workers sharing in a process of constantly seeking improvement through new knowledge, new skills, and new applications of knowledge and skills to achieving the goals of the organization. They examine what they do, compare that to what needs to be done, reflect on what they have learned, and make the needed change in the organization.
Leaders Make or Break Employee Engagement - A leader’s attitude and behavior determine whether an
organization has an engaged workforce or not. In other words, what leaders think and feel and say and do has a profound impact on employee satisfaction, enthusiasm for their work, desire to do their best, and commitment to go beyond their job descriptions every day. In an article for The Business Thinker, my colleague Jim Stilwell and I describe 13 ways in which leaders affect employee engagement.
What Gets Measured Gets Done...Revisited - Measurement is not enough. An organization has to do
something with those metrics in order to “get done” what needs to get done, i.e., organizational learning, performance improvement, and change. The act of measuring things like sales, customer service, product quality, teamwork, employee engagement, or learning, does not necessarily mean that anything will be done differently.
Why Evaluate Executive Coaching - CEOs and Boards are beginning to ask if the substantial investment
they are making in executive coaching is paying off. Unfortunately, we don’t know much about the impact of coaching. Studies tend to rely on surveys of executives who are being coached. But this method of studying coaching is fraught with problems.
What Do You Mean? - Dan Pallotta, president of Advertising for Humanity and HBR blogger, in
a post titled “I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore”, writes about business jargon and how it affects communication in organizations. The blog post must have hit a nerve because it has broken the record for most comments to a single HBR Blog Network post.
Wishing you a healthy and prosperous 2013!
