Organizational Communication Quotes

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Every time I read a management or self-help book, I find myself saying, “That’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation.” The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
there is no such thing as too much communication.
Patrick Lencioni (The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business)
The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
One of the greatest responsibilities of an organization’s leadership is to communicate with unwavering clarity the values on which the organization has been built.
Vern Dosch
leaders confuse the mere transfer of information to an audience with the audience’s ability to understand, internalize, and embrace the message that is being communicated.
Patrick Lencioni (The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business)
the best way to ensure that a message gets communicated throughout an organization is to spread rumors about it.
Patrick Lencioni (The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business)
The most well-intentioned, well-designed departmental communication program will not tear down silos unless the people who created those silos want them torn down.
Patrick Lencioni (The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business)
The principles of classical management theory have become so deeply ingrained in the ways managers think about organizations that for most of them the design of formal structures, linked by clear lines of communication, coordination, and control, has become almost second nature. This largely unconscious embrace of the mechanistic approach to management has now become one of the main obstacles to organizational change.
Fritjof Capra (The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision)
I want to learn about their organizational culture and values.
John C. Maxwell (Everyone Communicates, Few Connect: What the Most Effective People Do Differently)
A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.
Anonymous
To align message with market is simply to communicate a message that resonates with your market.
Mark Rutland (ReLaunch How to Stage an Organizational Comeback)
Dialogue isn’t a competition to be the smartest or the most correct person in the room; it is a collaboration to find the truth.
Oli Anderson (Dialogue / Ego - Real Communication)
Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
In your position as leader, your actions are amplified; it’s as if you are talking through a bullhorn every time you communicate with your employees. They hear your criticism more loudly than you mean it, and they hear your praise and thanks more loudly than it sounds to you. Use your bullhorn wisely.
Mark Rutland (ReLaunch How to Stage an Organizational Comeback)
We are committed to involving as many people as possible, as young as possible, as soon as possible. Sometimes too young and too soon! But we intentionally err on the side of too fast rather than too slow. We don’t wait until people feel “prepared” or “fully equipped.” Seriously, when is anyone ever completely prepared for ministry? Ministry makes people’s faith bigger. If you want to increase someone’s confidence in God, put him in a ministry position before he feels fully equipped. The messages your environments communicate have the potential to trump your primary message. If you don’t see a mess, if you aren’t bothered by clutter, you need to make sure there is someone around you who does see it and is bothered by it. An uncomfortable or distracting setting can derail ministry before it begins. The sermon begins in the parking lot. Assign responsibility, not tasks. At the end of the day, it’s application that makes all the difference. Truth isn’t helpful if no one understands or remembers it. If you want a church full of biblically educated believers, just teach what the Bible says. If you want to make a difference in your community and possibly the world, give people handles, next steps, and specific applications. Challenge them to do something. As we’ve all seen, it’s not safe to assume that people automatically know what to do with what they’ve been taught. They need specific direction. This is hard. This requires an extra step in preparation. But this is how you grow people. Your current template is perfectly designed to produce the results you are currently getting. We must remove every possible obstacle from the path of the disinterested, suspicious, here-against-my-will, would-rather-be-somewhere-else, unchurched guests. The parking lot, hallways, auditorium, and stage must be obstacle-free zones. As a preacher, it’s my responsibility to offend people with the gospel. That’s one reason we work so hard not to offend them in the parking lot, the hallway, at check-in, or in the early portions of our service. We want people to come back the following week for another round of offending! Present the gospel in uncompromising terms, preach hard against sin, and tackle the most emotionally charged topics in culture, while providing an environment where unchurched people feel comfortable. The approach a church chooses trumps its purpose every time. Nothing says hypocrite faster than Christians expecting non-Christians to behave like Christians when half the Christians don’t act like it half the time. When you give non-Christians an out, they respond by leaning in. Especially if you invite them rather than expect them. There’s a big difference between being expected to do something and being invited to try something. There is an inexorable link between an organization’s vision and its appetite for improvement. Vision exposes what has yet to be accomplished. In this way, vision has the power to create a healthy sense of organizational discontent. A leader who continually keeps the vision out in front of his or her staff creates a thirst for improvement. Vision-centric churches expect change. Change is a means to an end. Change is critical to making what could and should be a reality. Write your vision in ink; everything else should be penciled in. Plans change. Vision remains the same. It is natural to assume that what worked in the past will always work. But, of course, that way of thinking is lethal. And the longer it goes unchallenged, the more difficult it is to identify and eradicate. Every innovation has an expiration date. The primary reason churches cling to outdated models and programs is that they lack leadership.
Andy Stanley (Deep and Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend)
if one keeps climbing upward in the chain of command within the brain, one finds at the very top those over-all organizational forces and dynamic properties of the large patterns of cerebral excitation that are correlated with mental states or psychic activity…. Near the apex of this command system in the brain…. we find ideas. Man over the chimpanzee has ideas and ideals. In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burst-wise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell. Who
Douglas R. Hofstadter (I Am a Strange Loop)
With all the latest whiz-bang technology and massive databases and communications pipes at their disposal, there was a constant self-generated pressure to put all the technology to good use, to do something. Unfortunately, that something was the unending creation of timelines, policies, and plans—the embalming fluid of organizational nimbleness.
Pete Blaber (The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander)
Furthermore, theory that is based on the assumption that the participants coolly and “rationally” calculate their advantages according to a consistent value system forces us to think more thoroughly about the meaning of “irrationality.” Decision-makers are not simply distributed along a one-dimensional scale that stretches from complete rationality at one end to complete irrationality at the other. Rationality is a collection of attributes, and departures from complete rationality may be in many different directions. Irrationality can imply a disorderly and inconsistent value system, faulty calculation, an inability to receive messages or to communicate efficiently; it can imply random or haphazard influences in the reaching of decisions or the transmission of them, or in the receipt or conveyance of information; and it sometimes merely reflects the collective nature of a decision among individuals who do not have identical value systems and whose organizational arrangements and communication systems do not cause them to act like a single entity.
Thomas C. Schelling (The Strategy Of Conflict)
the development of human physiology has enabled us to call out in ourselves, as we communicate with others with significant symbols, a similar reaction to the one we are calling out in others. Mind, or our conversation of gestures with ourselves, the internal conversation which is thinking, allows us to make continuous adjustments to problems which arise between us and our environment, and between different aspects of ourselves:
Chris Mowles (Managing in Uncertainty: Complexity and the paradoxes of everyday organizational life)
Chris Argyris criticized “good communication that blocks learning,” arguing that formal communication mechanisms like focus groups and organizational surveys in effect give employees mechanisms for letting management know what they think without taking any responsibility for problems and their role in doing something about them. These mechanisms fail because “they do not get people to reflect on their own work and behavior. They do not encourage individual accountability.
Peter M. Senge (The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization)
For example, consider the following from Diane, one of a few female lawers in a large law practice: One late afternoon I was up on the 7th floor of our building, and I walked by a room that is usually locked, but the door was open a bit and I could hear people laughing and joking behind it. When I opened the door, I saw several of the other lawyers, all male, sitting around, drinking alcohol, and having a great time. I walked in and said, “What is this room? I didn’t even know it was here.” One of the male lawyers said with a smirk on his face, “Oh, that’s because only the kings have keys.” In this law firm, a boy’s club was alive and well.
Daniel P. Modaff (Organizational Communication: Foundations, Challenges, and Misunderstandings)
A major challenge in constructing theories and models is to identify the important quantities that capture the essential dynamics at each organizational level of a system. For instance, in thinking about the solar system, the masses of the planets and the sun are clearly of central importance in determining the motion of the planets, but their color (Mars red, the Earth mottled blue, Venus white, etc.) is irrelevant: the color of the planets is irrelevant for calculating the details of their motion. Similarly, we don’t need to know the color of the satellites that allow us to communicate on our cell phones when calculating their detailed motion.
Geoffrey West (Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies)
Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company. The architecture might include the organizational design, meetings, processes, email, yammer, and even one-on-one meetings with managers and employees. Absent a well-designed communication architecture, information and ideas will stagnate, and your company will degenerate into a bad place to work. While it is quite possible to design a great communication architecture without one-on-one meetings, in most cases one-on-ones provide an excellent mechanism for information and ideas to flow up the organization and should be part of your design.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
Linking the digital and physical worlds in these ways will have profound implications for both. But this future won’t be realized unless the Internet of Things learns from the history of the Internet. The open standards and decentralized design of the Internet won out over competing proprietary systems and centralized control by offering fewer obstacles to innovation and growth. This battle has resurfaced with the proliferation of conflicting visions of how devices should communicate. The challenge is primarily organizational, rather then technological, a contest between command-and-control technology and distributed solutions. The Internet of Things demands the latter, and openness will eventually triumph.
Anonymous
In addition to work, ADHD can significantly impact family life and relationships. The effects of ADHD on relationships are not necessarily negative; in fact, they can bring out many positive attributes. Loved ones may feel energized around you and recognize that your sense of spontaneity and creative expression brings a lot of joy into their lives. On the flip side, friends and family may complain about imbalanced relationships, issues with intimacy, and/or fraught dynamics. If you get easily sidetracked, you may be late to dates with friends and family (or completely forget to meet). You may forget to respond to emails, calls, and test. Family and friends may take these behaviors personally. This can feel hurtful to you when you are trying your best with a brain that works differently than theirs. Of course, this does not have anything to do with how much you care for your loved ones, so communicating what you're going through and strengthening your organizational skills to respect important commitments can keep your treasured relationships humming along smoothly.
Christy Duan MD (Managing ADHD Workbook for Women: Exercises and Strategies to Improve Focus, Motivation, and Confidence)
three tiers to the heart: physical, ethereal, Eternal with each one being more spiritual and subtle the physical heart a little brain with over 40,000 neurons it sends and receives by electromagnetic field operations it's got its own nervous system that senses and remembers making decisions and giving directions to other centers emitting enfolded energetic organizational patterns information, that is—communicative interactions detected outside the body by magnetometers and other people for heart coherence listen to Pärt's “Spiegel im Spiegel” valid are chakras and acupuncture meridians meditate on the heart chakra to see what this means energy meridians are strings of polarized crystalline water bioelectric signals transmitted in connective tissue matter information is sent along these lengths of collagen proteins molecules of structured water allowing the transfer of protons crystal water wires inside protein pathways with acupuncture points being junctures in the maze the protons, then, are what have been referred to as “chi” a current flowing, much like electrical circuitry
Jarett Sabirsh (Love All-Knowing: An Epic Spiritual Poem)
In the future that globalists and feminists have imagined, for most of us there will only be more clerkdom and masturbation. There will only be more apologizing, more submission, more asking for permission to be men. There will only be more examinations, more certifications, mandatory prerequisites, screening processes, background checks, personality tests, and politicized diagnoses. There will only be more medication. There will be more presenting the secretary with a cup of your own warm urine. There will be mandatory morning stretches and video safety presentations and sign-off sheets for your file. There will be more helmets and goggles and harnesses and bright orange vests with reflective tape. There can only be more counseling and sensitivity training. There will be more administrative hoops to jump through to start your own business and keep it running. There will be more mandatory insurance policies. There will definitely be more taxes. There will probably be more Byzantine sexual harassment laws and corporate policies and more ways for women and protected identity groups to accuse you of misconduct. There will be more micro-managed living, pettier regulations, heavier fines, and harsher penalties. There will be more ways to run afoul of the law and more ways for society to maintain its pleasant illusions by sweeping you under the rug. In 2009 there were almost five times more men either on parole or serving prison terms in the United States than were actively serving in all of the armed forces.[64] If you’re a good boy and you follow the rules, if you learn how to speak passively and inoffensively, if you can convince some other poor sleepwalking sap that you are possessed with an almost unhealthy desire to provide outstanding customer service or increase operational efficiency through the improvement of internal processes and effective organizational communication, if you can say stupid shit like that without laughing, if your record checks out and your pee smells right—you can get yourself a J-O-B. Maybe you can be the guy who administers the test or authorizes the insurance policy. Maybe you can be the guy who helps make some soulless global corporation a little more money. Maybe you can get a pat on the head for coming up with the bright idea to put a bunch of other guys out of work and outsource their boring jobs to guys in some other place who are willing to work longer hours for less money. Whatever you do, no matter what people say, no matter how many team-building activities you attend or how many birthday cards you get from someone’s secretary, you will know that you are a completely replaceable unit of labor in the big scheme of things.
Jack Donovan (The Way of Men)
Implicit Communication The German organizational climate encouraged people to act, and to take the initiative, even during the terror and chaos of war. Within this climate, the principles of mutual trust and intuitive competence make much of implicit communication, as opposed to detailed, written instructions. The Germans felt they had no alternative. As the Chief of the Prussian General Staff in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, observed in the mid-1800s, the greater risk is the loss of time that comes from always trying to be explicit.61 Or as General Gaedcke commented about his unit in WW II, if he had tried to write everything down, “we would have been too late with every attack we ever attempted.”62
Chet Richards (Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business)
The future of organizational success will come from people communicating with each other across the organization, not up and down the hierarchy. This is not or should not be scary, if you trust your people and are open with them yourself. If you don’t trust them, nothing else is going to work either, in the long term.
Clark N Quinn (Revolutionize Learning & Development: Performance and Innovation Strategy for the Information Age)
Think of the organizational design as the communications architecture for your company. If you want people to communicate, the best way to accomplish that is to make them report to the same manager. By contrast, the further away people are in the organizational chart, the less they will communicate.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
It is common understanding that communication is at the heart of any organisation. So, why have organisational models not evolved accordingly? To truly leverage the potential of this information age, we need to rethink and redesign organisations
Miguel Reynolds Brandao (The Sustainable Organisation - a paradigm for a fairer society: Think about sustainability in an age of technological progress and rising inequality)
It is common understanding that communication is at the heart of any organisation. So, why have organisational models not evolved accordingly?
Miguel Reynolds Brandao (The Sustainable Organisation - a paradigm for a fairer society: Think about sustainability in an age of technological progress and rising inequality)
Market value. The process of creating a value-based résumé will result in your being able to effectively identify and communicate your value to prospective employers. Your résumé will clearly communicate bottom-line results and organizational contributions you can produce that position you as a highly qualified and valuable candidate.
Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
A Return-to-Work Candidate To utilize skills and abilities to meet organizational goals in a loyal, dependable, and professional manner Excellent phone skills Good communication skills Sound judgment, good decision making skills Good character: honest, trustworthy, dependable Assignments completed on time Willingness to go the extra mile Team player High school graduate
Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
Handling Resignations   In the course of an organization’s work, boards and officers may be confronted with the resignation of a fellow officer, board member, or committee chairman. There are two reasons people resign from office. The first reason is that something arises in the personal life of the officer that demands his or her time and attention. The officer feels at this time that he or she can’t fulfill the duties of the office and do justice to the organization, so the officer submits a resignation. The second reason is that there is a rift or severe disagreement within the organization. An officer may become angry, disheartened, or vengeful, so he or she submits a resignation. The first thing that the organization should do after it receives a resignation is to figure out why the person is resigning. If the organization really needs this person’s active input, it should find a way to keep him or her. If the person is resigning because of lack of time, then perhaps the organization can appoint an assistant to help with the work. If the person is resigning because he or she can’t attend the meetings, the organization should consider changing the meeting date and time. If the person submits his or her resignation because of organizational problems, the organization needs to look at how its members communicate with each other. Perhaps the members need to be more willing to allow disagreements and hear what others are saying. If an organization strictly obeys the principle of majority rule while protecting the rights of the minority, it can resolve problems in an intelligent, kind, and civil way. A resignation should be a formal letter that includes the date, the name of the person to whom it is addressed, the reason for the resignation, and the person’s signature. The person resigning can mail his or her letter to the secretary or hand it to the secretary in person. Under no circumstance should the secretary or president accept an oral resignation. If a resignation is given to the officer this way, he or she should talk with the person and find out the reasons for the resignation. Perhaps just talking to the person can solve the problem. However, an officer who insists on resigning should put it in writing and submit it to the secretary. This gives the accepting body something to read and consider. Every resignation should be put to a vote. When it is accepted, the office is vacant and should be immediately filled according to the rules for filling vacancies stated in the bylaws. If an officer submits a resignation and then decides to withdraw it, he or she can do this until a vote is taken. It is unjust for a secretary or governing body not to allow a withdrawal of the resignation before a vote is taken. The only way a resignation can’t be withdrawn is if some rule of the organization or a state statute prohibits it. When submitting the resignation, the member resigning should give it to the secretary only and not mail it to everyone in the organization. (An e-mail resignation is not acceptable because it is not signed.) Sending the resignation to every member only confuses matters and promotes gossip and conjecture in the organization. If the member later decides to withdraw his or her resignation, there is much more explaining to do. The other members may see this person as unstable and not worthy of the position.
Robert McConnell Productions (Webster's New World: Robert's Rules of Order: Simplified & Applied)
Cisco figured out that mergers between similar-sized companies rarely work, as there are frequently struggles about which team will control the combined entity (think Daimler-Chrysler or Dean Witter–Morgan Stanley). Cisco’s leaders also determined that mergers work best when companies are geographically proximate, making integration and collaboration much easier (think Synoptics and Wellfleet Communication, which were not only about equal in size, but 2,500 miles apart), and they also uncovered the importance of organizational cultural
Jeffrey Pfeffer (Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management)
Half of all law enforcement agencies in the United States have fewer than ten officers, and nearly three-quarters have fewer than 25 officers.48 Lawrence Sherman noted in his testimony that “so many problems of organizational quality control are made worse by the tiny size of most local police agencies . . . less than 1 percent of 17,985 U.S. police agencies meet the English minimum of 1,000 employees or more.”49 These small forces often lack the resources for training and equipment accessible to larger departments and often are prevented by municipal boundaries and local custom from combining forces with neighboring agencies. Funding and technical assistance can give smaller agencies the incentive to share policies and practices and give them access to a wider variety of training, equipment, and communications technology than they could acquire on their own. Table 1. Full-time state and local law enforcement employees, by size of agency, 2008
U.S. Department of Justice. Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (Interim Report of The President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing)
Once a leadership team has become cohesive and worked to establish clarity and alignment around the answers to the six critical questions, then, and only then, can they effectively move on to the next step: communicating those answers. Or better yet, overcommunicating those answers—over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
Patrick Lencioni (The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business)
Flexible organizational structures, in which teams across functions or disciplines organize around solutions, can facilitate good connections. Media conglomerate Publicis has “holistic communication” teams, which combine people across its ad agencies (Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett, Publicis Worldwide, and so on) and technology groups to focus on customers and brands. Novartis has organized around diseases, with R&D more closely connected to markets and customers; this has helped the company introduce pathbreaking innovations faster, such as its cancer drug Gleevec. The success of Seagate’s companywide Factory of the Future team at introducing seemingly miraculous process innovations led to widespread use of its core-teams model.
Harvard Business Publishing (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation (with featured article "The Discipline of Innovation," by Peter F. Drucker))
Questions have changed me immensely. I have greater self-confidence and a more relaxed attitude. I don't feel that I always have to have the answers in conversations or in situations where I need to speak at the spur of the moment. I feel this has increased my communication skills, especially listening and persuading. I have more trust in myself and others. Leading with questions has led to more trust, which appears to be a paradox of group life. I have stronger initiative and commitment. I learn more as I have become more directional by more questions. I have more patience and self-control, have greater openness and transparency. I now see myself as more adaptable and flexible. I am optimistic about opportunities [and] more inspirational and have greater vision and cognitive capability. Questions have given me greater understanding of organizational and political realities; I recognize the importance of organizational context and orientation. I am more willing to take risks in creating opportunities. I have a greater empathy with employees, customers, and others and a stronger commitment to develop others. My empowerment orientation is greater.
Michael J. Marquardt (Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask)
they must create the environment for action. In June 1967 Robert Kennedy said, “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And in the total of all those acts, will be written the history of this generation” (p. 237).
Daniel P. Modaff (Organizational Communication: Foundations, Challenges, and Misunderstandings)
The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership (2005). He advises that a leader “needs to be able to see the shades of gray inherent in a situation in order to make wise decisions as to how to proceed” (p. 7). He encourages leaders to examine all arguments without forming an opinion, using an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote for support: “The test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time while still retaining the ability to function
Daniel P. Modaff (Organizational Communication: Foundations, Challenges, and Misunderstandings)
Unfortunately, some leaders use their power to instill fear in employees.
Daniel P. Modaff (Organizational Communication: Foundations, Challenges, and Misunderstandings)
In our experience as employees, leaders, and consultants, issues of power and control—more than any other emotions—create the greatest conflicts and most unpleasant work environments. Unfortunately, some individuals are motivated by power alone to seek positions of leadership.
Daniel P. Modaff (Organizational Communication: Foundations, Challenges, and Misunderstandings)
This isn’t, however, just a public relations challenge for organizational leaders; corporate social responsibility is a very real issue for job seekers. For the 2007 Cone’s Millennial Cause Study, 68 percent of Generation Y’ers stated that they currently do or will refuse to work for a company that does not have a strong corporate social responsibility record, and 75 percent will pay particularly close attention, both for employment and consumer choices, to companies who have strong CSR records. Numerous studies have found that a company’s CSR record will affect an organization’s ability to recruit and retain qualified employees (i.e., Chesloff, 2010; Greening & Turban, 2000). Murray’s (2008) survey found that one third of the respondents felt working for a caring and responsible employer was more important than the salary that they earned, and nearly one half would turn away from an employer with a negative corporate social responsibility history.
Daniel P. Modaff (Organizational Communication: Foundations, Challenges, and Misunderstandings)
Guideline #3: Remember for whom you are writing the résumé. In most cases, you’re writing your résumé for a stranger who doesn’t know you at all. Your main objective is to understand what prospective employers are looking for and then to provide that information clearly on your résumé. Do prospective employers want to read your biography, or do they prefer to know how you can contribute to their organizational goals? Before you write your résumé, seek first to understand the needs of potential employers, and then communicate, on your résumé, how you can best meet those needs.
Jay A. Block (101 Best Ways to Land a Job in Troubled Times)
In 1983 Eugene Koprowski turned to mythology for his Organizational Dynamics article prediction that there would be considerable “foot-dragging and resistance on the part of the male power structure” in the quest for female social equity at work.
Kathleen Kelley Reardon (They Don't Get It, Do They?: Communication in the Workplace -- Closing the Gap Between Women and Men)
The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
Transformational leadership means leaders inspiring and motivating followers to achieve higher performance by appealing to their values and sense of purpose, facilitating wide-scale organizational change. Such leaders encourage their teams to work toward a common goal through their vision, values, communication, example-setting, and their evident caring about their followers’ personal needs.
Nicole Forsgren (Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations)
Think about this. What would it take for you (or your staff) to move on from your current organization? Would you leave to feel valued, empowered, and largely left to your skills without being micromanaged but with the occasional “Hey, thanks for doing a great job!” from your manager? Organizational leaders: are you doing the little things to retain people? Are these attributes inherent and apparent in your organizational culture? If you are not asking yourselves these questions, you’d be wise to start doing so immediately. We should never underestimate how important it is for people to feel they are valued, respected, and heard. They want to know their voices matter and be met with a high level of responsiveness. All these needs rely on effective communication as the glue to bind them together.
Albert Collu (Catapulting Change: Mindful Leadership To Launch Organizations and People)
The following are some of the most common mistakes made by project managers: Not clearly understanding how or ensuring that the project is aligned with organizational objectives. Not properly managing stakeholder expectations throughout the project. Not gaining agreement and buy-in on project goals and success criteria from key stakeholders. Not developing a realistic schedule that includes all work efforts, task dependencies, bottom-up estimates, and assigned leveled resources. Not getting buy-in and acceptance on the project schedule. Not clearly deciding and communicating who is responsible for what. Not utilizing change control procedures to manage the scope of the project. Not communicating consistently and effectively with all key stakeholders. Not executing the project plan. Not tackling key risks early in the project. Not proactively identifying risks and developing contingency plans (responses) for those risks. Not obtaining the right resources with the right skills at the right time. Not aggressively pursuing issue resolution. Inadequately defining and managing requirements. Insufficiently managing and leading the project team.
Gregory M. Horine (Project Management Absolute Beginner's Guide)
Management by objective (MBO) which means purposeful leadership to achieve a strategic objective is one of the keys to successful airline management. MBO is also referred to as Management by Results – MBR. This is a system where subordinates coordinate with their superiors to achieve the desired objective. Under this principle, the goals of the organization are linked to employee goals. Management objectives are made to meet operational objectives. And both management and operational objectives are made to achieve organizational long-term objectives. Organisational objectives are linked to the vision and mission of the organisation. The team is made aware of the achievable goals of the organization and unified effort is exerted in that direction; on the other hand, the employee whose performance is noteworthy will be rewarded by the organization. This builds a transparent and clean work culture on one hand and the other unclogs communication blocks.
Henrietta Newton Martin, Legal Counsel & Author - Fundamentals of Airlines and Airports Management
In any conversation, organizational or otherwise, people tend to overuse one particular rhetorical tool at the expense of all the others. People’s default mode of communication tends to be advocacy—argumentation in favor or their own conclusions and theories, statements about the truth of their own point of view.
A.G. Lafley (Playing to win: How strategy really works)
Effective leaders understand that managing sustainability and ESG both involves work and creates opportunity, It;s a horizontal versus a vertical organizational process, with spectacular range and ability to drop to incredible depths if need be. It's the submarine effect. It shares specific characteristics with initiatives cutting across you organization's vertical business units, such as your digitization and talent management efforts.
Paul Pierroz (The Purpose-Driven Marketing Handbook: How to Discover Your Impact and Communicate Your Business Sustainability Story to Grow Sales, Retain Talent, and Attract Investors)
With this in mind, here are the basic steps to organizational design: 1. Figure out what needs to be communicated. Start by listing the most important knowledge and who needs to have it. For example, knowledge of the product architecture must be understood by engineering, QA, product management, marketing, and sales. 2. Figure out what needs to be decided. Consider the types of decisions that must get made on a frequent basis: feature selection, architectural decisions, how to resolve support issues. How can you design the organization to put the maximum number of decisions under the domain of a designated manager? 3. Prioritize the most important communication and decision paths. Is it more important for product managers to understand the product architecture or the market? Is it more important for engineers to understand the customer or the architecture? Keep in mind that these priorities will be based on today’s situation. If the situation changes, then you can reorganize. 4. Decide who’s going to run each group. Notice that this is the fourth step, not the first. You want to optimize the organization for the people—for the people doing the work—not for the managers. Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization. Making this step four will upset your managers, but they will get over it. 5. Identify the paths that you did not optimize. As important as picking the communication paths that you will optimize is identifying the ones that you will not. Just because you deprioritized them doesn’t mean they are unimportant. If you ignore them entirely, they will surely come back to bite you. 6. Build a plan for mitigating the issues identified in step five. Once you’ve identified the likely issues, you will know the processes you will need to build to patch the impending cross-organizational challenges.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
Online community, between people who have usually never met and share only select aspects of their lives, presumes inclusion and belonging through communicational modes that borrow from successful real-life intimacy. It prioritizes openness and transparency, encourages emotional response (albeit in a limited way through, for example, Facebook’s ever-powerful ‘like’ button), and claims to promote consensus. This rhetoric of openness and sharing—a presumption of egalitarian transparency—is inherent in the corporate mantra of Google (‘Do no evil’), Facebook (‘making the Web more social’), and Flickr-Yahoo (‘Share your pictures, watch the world’). Yet just as inner-city windows might present an illusion of togetherness in which isolation is actually the norm, this presumed openness of virtual communities hides the fact that inclusion in social media can be fickle and conditional; digital citizenship hides multiple power dynamics and relations,not all of which are explicitly stated. Whereas there has been some discussion of the meanings of digital citizenship (to mean the accepted norms of appropriate, responsible technology use), online ‘community’ is invoked as a given. The Professor of Media Studies at Utrecht University, José van Dijck, refers in her discussion of social media’s history to ‘community function’ and ‘community character’; ‘community collectivism’ and ‘community utilization’; and to ‘community’ itself as being innovative, organizational, self-selecting, and open. But community, like citizenship, carries an enormous functional, symbolic, and practical weight. What kinds of ‘community’ are being forged online, and how do they impact on self-esteem, a sense of belonging, and self-identity? How does online community differ from offline community, and how and why does loneliness result?
Fay Bound Alberti (A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion)
Emerging operating models also mean that talent and culture have to be rethought in light of new skill requirements and the need to attract and retain the right sort of human capital. As data become central to both decision-making and operating models across industries, workforces require new skills, while processes need to be upgraded (for example, to take advantage of the availability of real-time information) and cultures need to evolve. As I mentioned, companies need to adapt to the concept of “talentism”. This is one of the most important, emerging drivers of competitiveness. In a world where talent is the dominant form of strategic advantage, the nature of organizational structures will have to be rethought. Flexible hierarchies, new ways of measuring and rewarding performance, new strategies for attracting and retaining skilled talent will all become key for organizational success. A capacity for agility will be as much about employee motivation and communication as it will be about setting business priorities and managing physical assets. My
Klaus Schwab (The Fourth Industrial Revolution)
What’s really changed? What should you do? Broader impact horizon. There is a broader range of issues, people, and ideas to focus on. Balance depth and breadth. Greater complexity and ambiguity. There are more variables, and there is greater uncertainty about outcomes. Delegate more deeply. Tougher organizational politics. There are more powerful stakeholders to contend with. Influence differently. Further from the front lines. There is greater distance between you and the people executing on the ground, potentially weakening communication and adding more filters. Communicate more formally. More scrutiny. There is more attention paid to your actions by more people, more frequently. Adjust to greater visibility.
Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
Anderson’s use of the word ‘grotesque’ is quite important in this context. In its usual sense in reference to human beings it connotes disgust or revulsion, but Anderson’s use is quite different. To him a grotesque is, as he points out later, like the twisted apples that are left behind in the orchards because they are imperfect. These apples, he says, are the sweetest of all, perhaps even because of the imperfections that have caused them to be rejected. He approaches the people in his stories as he does the apples, secure in his knowledge that the sources or natures of their deformities are unimportant when compared to their intrinsic worth as human beings needing and deserving of understanding. This approach is based on intuition rather than objective knowledge, and it is the same sort of intuition with which one approaches the twisted apples; he believes that one dare not reject because of mere appearance, either physical or spiritual; that appearance may mask a significant experience made more intense and more worthwhile by the deformity itself. In the body of the work proper, following this introductory sketch, Anderson has set up an organizational pattern that no only gives partial unity to the book but explores systematically the diverse origins of the isolation of his people, each of whom is in effect a social displaced person because he is cut off from human intercourse with his fellow human beings. In the first three stories Anderson deals with three aspects of the problem of human isolation. The first story, ‘Hands,’ deals with the inability to communicate feeling; the second, ‘Paper Pills,’ is devoted to the inability to communicate thought; and the third, ‘Mother,’ focuses on the inability to communicate love. This three-phased examination of the basic problem of human isolation sets the tone for the rest of the book because these three shortcomings, resulting partially from the narrowness of the vision of each central figure but primarily from the lack of sympathy with which the contemporaries of each regard him, are the real creators of the grotesques in human nature. Each of the three characters has encountered one aspect of the problem: he has something that he feels is vital and real within himself that he wants desperately to reveal to others, but in each case he is rebuffed, and, turning in upon himself, he becomes a bit more twisted and worn spiritually. But, like the apples left in the orchards, he is the sweeter, the more human for it. In each case the inner vision of the main character remains clear, and the thing that he wishes to communicate is in itself good, but his inability to break through the shell that prevents him from talking to others results in misunderstanding and spiritual tragedy. David D. Anderson “Sherwood Anderson’s Moments of Insight
David D. Anderson (Sherwood Anderson: An Introduction and Interpretation (American Authors and Critics Series))
Organization and division of function carry an inherent tendency to distributive power, deriving from supervision and coordination. For the division of power is deceptive: Although it involves specialization of function at all levels, the top overlooks and directs the whole. Those who occupy supervisory and coordinating position have immense organizational superiority over the others. The interaction and communication networks actually center their function , as can be seen easily enough in the organizational chart possessed by every modern firm. The chart allows superiors to control the entire organization, and it prevents those at the bottom from sharing in this control. It enables those at the top to set in motion machinery for implementing collective goals. Though anyone can refuse to obey, opportunities are probably lacking for establishing alternative machinery for implementing their goals. As Mosca notes, "The power of any minority is irresistible as against any single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority." The few at the top can keep the masses compliant, provided their control is institutionalized in the laws and norms of the social group in which they operate. Institutionalization is necessary to achieve routine collective goals; and thus distributive power, that is, social stratification, also becomes an institutionalized feature of social life. There is, thus, a simple answer to why the masses do not revolt-a perennial problem for social stratification- and it does not concern value consensus, or force, or exchange in the usual sense of those convenient sociological explanations. The masses comply because they lack collective organization to do otherwise, because they are embedded within collective and distributive power organizations controlled by others. They are organizationally outflanked
Michael Mann (The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760)
They found that the best results required three things: • that people be given a great deal of freedom in figuring out how to carry out the work—that is, the opportunity to make day-to-day decisions in the project • that team members felt challenged in a positive fashion by the work • that people felt they had sufficient organizational support (resources, a supportive work group, a supportive supervisor who communicated well, and an organizational environment where creativity was encouraged)
Laura Vanderkam (168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think)
Core values live where identity and goals overlap—they touch into who you are at your depths and how you express what is important to you through your actions. Take the time to start identifying what you value and communicate that and your company’s values through all levels of your organization.
Marc A. Pitman (The Surprising Gift of Doubt: Use Uncertainty to Become the Exceptional Leader You Are Meant to Be)
At the organizational level, this value can take the form of acquiring the capacity to sustain ongoing evaluative inquiry. This outcome is more likely when participants experience evaluation as a meaningful and productive way to enhance patterns of work and communication. Participatory, collaborative, appreciative, and empowering mechanisms are often at the heart of evaluations where process use is a high priority. These mechanisms can promote stakeholder ownership of the evaluation processes and products and thus enhance process use, as well as use of evaluation findings. For some organizations, evaluation capacity building means that evaluation stakeholders learn how to work effectively with external evaluators. This organizational learning further facilitates the contributions that external evaluation processes and findings can make to the organization’s growth and productivity.
Donald B. Yarbrough (The Program Evaluation Standards: A Guide for Evaluators and Evaluation Users)
Defend organizational change. Inevitable resistance can be mitigated if the change is carefully discussed, planned, embraced, communicated and ultimately defended.
Jim Knight (Leadership That Rocks)
Assessments should help us grow in compassion for others by showing us how different people communicate, think, and process information. And they give us all a common language for communicating those differences with one another.
Marc A. Pitman (The Surprising Gift of Doubt: Use Uncertainty to Become the Exceptional Leader You Are Meant to Be)
The Mist of Mismanagement is similar to Clausewitz’s fog of war. Uncertainty impedes situational awareness, but unlike the fog of war, the mist is self-inflicted. It unnecessarily disrupts communication, engagement, and unity of action leading to organizational failures.
David A. Dolinsky (The Workplace Zombie: One Bureaucrat’s Path to Better Understanding the Virus and Its Vectors)
An often-overlooked duty of school administrators is coordinating staff and ensuring effective communication channels, vital for cohesive teamwork and organizational synergy.
Asuni LadyZeal
a team-based learning and development intervention that considers the team to be a system and is applied collectively to the team as a whole. The focus of team coaching is on team performance and the achievement of a common or shared team goal. Team learning is empowered via specific team coaching activities for self and team reflection, which is facilitated by the team coach(es) through the application of coaching techniques such as impactful, reflective questioning which raises awareness, builds trusting relationships and improves communication. A team coach does not provide advice or solutions to the team. Rather, team coaching requires advanced coaching skills from the coach such as considering multiple perspectives simultaneously and observing and interpreting dynamic interactions and is typically provided over a series of sessions rather than as a one-off intervention (p. 73).
Lucy Widdowson (Building Top-Performing Teams: A Practical Guide to Team Coaching to Improve Collaboration and Drive Organizational Success)
Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits. NASA administrators, for instance, tried for years to improve the agency’s safety habits, but those efforts were unsuccessful until the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. In the wake of that tragedy, the organization was able to overhaul how it enforced quality standards.40 Airline pilots, too, spent years trying to convince plane manufacturers and air traffic controllers to redesign how cockpits were laid out and traffic controllers communicated. Then, a runway error on the Spanish island of Tenerife in 1977 killed 583 people and, within five years, cockpit design, runway procedures, and air traffic controller communication routines were overhauled.41
Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do and How to Change)
Relationship elements with the strongest correlation to successful therapeutic outcomes (Norcross, 2010) Useful questions for building relationships at an individual and team level Empathy “Involves entering the private, perceptual world of the other” and “communicating that understanding back to the client in ways that can be received and appreciated” (p. 118). How well do you really listen (listening like they are the most important person in the world)? Do you listen to the whole person (beyond their words)? How well do you sensitively communicate back your understanding of how you think the other person is feeling (feeling with another)? Alliance “The quality and strength of the collaborative relationship” (p. 120) How strong is your emotional bond to the other person? What can you do to strengthen it? What could be getting in the way of a stronger bond? Cohesion (in groups) “The forces that cause members to remain in the group” (p. 121) How do you help the team develop cohesion? What do you do that decreases team cohesion? What could you do more of to develop team cohesion? Goal Consensus and Collaboration “The therapist and client journey together toward a mutual destination” (p. 122) Does the relationship have a joint overriding purpose from which goals can be derived? What do you want to achieve together that you cannot do separately? What would success for this relationship look like? Adapted from Norcross (2010: 118–25)
Lucy Widdowson (Building Top-Performing Teams: A Practical Guide to Team Coaching to Improve Collaboration and Drive Organizational Success)
Organizations need to decide which values they want to emphasize, and clearly communicate them to all members of the team. If you don't actively create the culture that you do want within your organization, a culture you don't want can develop organically.
Lyric Rivera (Workplace NeuroDiversity Rising: NeuroDiversity = ALL Brains NeuroDivergent and NeuroTypical working together & supporting each other)
vision, political skill, organizational capacity, public communicator, cognitive style (how a leader acquires and processes information), emotional intelligence, and moral character.7 If
David Shambaugh (China's Leaders: From Mao to Now)
A major challenge in constructing theories and models is to identify the important quantities that capture the essential dynamics at each organizational level of a system. For instance, in thinking about the solar system, the masses of the planets and the sun are clearly of central importance in determining the motion of the planets, but their color (Mars red, the Earth mottled blue, Venus white, etc.) is irrelevant: the color of the planets is irrelevant for calculating the details of their motion. Similarly, we don’t need to know the color of the satellites that allow us to communicate on our cell phones when calculating their detailed motion. However, this is clearly a scale-dependent statement in that if we look at the Earth from a very close distance of, say, just a few miles above its surface rather than from millions of miles away in space, then what was perceived as its color is now revealed as a manifestation of the huge diversity of the Earth’s surface phenomena, which include everything from mountains and rivers to lions, oceans, cities, forests, and us. So what was irrelevant at one scale can become dominant at another. The challenge at every level of observation is to abstract the important variables that determine the dominant behavior of the system.
Geoffrey West (Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies)
When you run a large organization, you tend to become very good at tasks such as complex decision-making, prioritization, organizational design, process improvement, and organizational communication. When you are building an organization, there is no organization to design, there are no processes to improve, and communicating with the organization is simple. On the other hand, you have to be very adept at running a high-quality hiring process, have terrific domain expertise (you are personally responsible for quality control), know how to create process from scratch, and be extremely creative about initiating new directions and tasks.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
Value Stream Management Do policies need to be changed to enable improved performance? Are there organization departmental reporting structures that can be changed to reduce conflicting goals or align resources? Do existing performance metrics (if any) encourage desired behaviors and discourage dysfunctional behavior? What key performance indicators (KPIs) will we use to monitor value stream performance? Who will monitor the KPIs? How frequently? Who else will results be communicated to? What visual systems can be created to aid in managing and monitoring the value stream? Are the key processes within the value stream clearly defined with their own KPIs, standardized appropriately, and measured and improved regularly?
Karen Martin (Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation)
When individuals and teams within an organization achieve data fluency, unproductive discussions about “where did that data come from?” and “what does that value mean?” are exchanged for deeper discussions about key organizational goals and metrics. Data
Zach Gemignani (Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication)
The five most highly correlated factors are: Organizational culture. Strong feelings of burnout are found in organizations with a pathological, power-oriented culture. Managers are ultimately responsible for fostering a supportive and respectful work environment, and they can do so by creating a blame-free environment, striving to learn from failures, and communicating a shared sense of purpose. Managers should also watch for other contributing factors and remember that human error is never the root cause of failure in systems. Deployment pain. Complex, painful deployments that must be performed outside of business hours contribute to high stress and feelings of lack of control.4 With the right practices in place, deployments don’t have to be painful events. Managers and leaders should ask their teams how painful their deployments are and fix the things that hurt the most. Effectiveness of leaders. Responsibilities of a team leader include limiting work in process and eliminating roadblocks for the team so they can get their work done. It’s not surprising that respondents with effective team leaders reported lower levels of burnout. Organizational investments in DevOps. Organizations that invest in developing the skills and capabilities of their teams get better outcomes. Investing in training and providing people with the necessary support and resources (including time) to acquire new skills are critical to the successful adoption of DevOps. Organizational performance. Our data shows that Lean management and continuous delivery practices help improve software delivery performance, which in turn improves organizational performance. At the heart of Lean management is giving employees the necessary time and resources to improve their own work. This means creating a work environment that supports experimentation, failure, and learning, and allows employees to make decisions that affect their jobs. This also means creating space for employees to do new, creative, value-add work during the work week—and not just expecting them to devote extra time after hours. A good example of this is Google’s 20% time policy, where the company allows employees 20% of their week to work on new projects, or IBM’s “THINK Friday” program, where Friday afternoons are designated for time without meetings and employees are encouraged to work on new and exciting projects they normally don’t have time for.
Nicole Forsgren (Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations)
I must express in the strongest possible terms my profound opposition to the newly instituted practice which imposes severe and intolerable restrictions on the ingress and egress of senior members of the hierarchy and will, in all probability, should the current deplorable innovation be perpetuated, precipitate a progressive constriction of the channels of communication, culminating in a condition of organizational atrophy and administrative paralysis which will render effectively impossible the coherent and co-ordinated discharge of the function of government within Her Majesty's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland." ..... "You mean you've lost your key?" I asked.
Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay
Communication is the continuation of business by other means. The business objective (or in the case of government or not-for-profit, the organizational objective) is the overriding goal, and communication is merely one of the means of achieving it. And means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.
Helio Fred Garcia (The Power of Communication: Skills to Build Trust, Inspire Loyalty, and Lead Effectively)
The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
Furthermore, it is not at all clear that the “official” organizational charts of companies represents the actuality of what the real operational network structures are. Who is really communicating with whom, how often are they doing it, how much do they exchange, and so on? What is really needed is access to all of the company’s communication channels, such as the phone calls, the e-mails, the meetings, et cetera, quantified analogously to the cell phone data we used for helping to develop a science of cities.
Geoffrey West (Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies)
The organizational digitalization is surely a transformation journey, as it has to permeate into business vision, strategy, culture, communication, and processes, etc.
Pearl Zhu (Digital Maturity: Take a Journey of a Thousand Miles from Functioning to Delight)
IT organizational maturity is achieved via harmonized communication, relentless innovation and flawless performance with continuous delivery.
Pearl Zhu (Digital Maturity: Take a Journey of a Thousand Miles from Functioning to Delight)
He developed a vision and a strategy based on identified value and communicating it using simple, easy-to-understand terminology.
Peter A. High (Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation)
My father works in a factory, and has done so for the past 14 years. All of their workers have to wear the same outfits—navy blue coveralls, brown steel toe boots—and they have to produce so much work each night. The company is telling them how to look, how to work, and sometimes how to think. Dad comes home each morning and he is still running like that machine. Before he began this job, he was much livelier. I never get to see the Dad that I had before age six. His constantly having to work as a part of a machine has stripped him of his personality and happiness. In another instance at the factory, he was injured on the job by a crane, and was instantly replaced by someone else on the line because the job could be done by “anyone.
Daniel P. Modaff (Organizational Communication: Foundations, Challenges, and Misunderstandings)
In most business books, the role of the CEO boils down to a small number of key responsibilities. The CEO: Sets the overall direction and strategy of the company and communicates this direction regularly to employees, customers, investors, etc. Hires, trains, and allocates company employees against this overall direction while maintaining company culture. Raises and/or allocates capital against this overall direction. Acts as chief psychologist of the company. Founders are often surprised by the extent to which people and organizational issues start to dominate their time.
Elad Gil (High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups From 10 to 10,000 People)
It seems ironic that, in this information age, millions of people feel such a lack of control over their lives. Obviously, the communications revolution has done little to overcome, and may even have contributed to, a feeling of detachment and disconnectedness with circumstances and other people.
Roger Connors (The Oz Principle: Getting Results Through Individual and Organizational Accountability)
When you scale an organization, you will also need to give ground grudgingly. Specialization, organizational structure, and process all complicate things and implementing them will feel like you are moving away from common knowledge and quality communication. It is very much like the offensive lineman taking a step backward. You will lose ground, but you will prevent your company from descending into chaos.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
The first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad. With any design, you will optimize communication among some parts of the organization at the expense of other parts.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
here are the basic steps to organizational design: 1. Figure out what needs to be communicated. Start by listing the most important knowledge and who needs to have it. For example, knowledge of the product architecture must be understood by engineering, QA, product management, marketing, and sales. 2. Figure out what needs to be decided. Consider the types of decisions that must get made on a frequent basis: feature selection, architectural decisions, how to resolve support issues. How can you design the organization to put the maximum number of decisions under the domain of a designated manager? 3. Prioritize the most important communication and decision paths. Is it more important for product managers to understand the product architecture or the market? Is it more important for engineers to understand the customer or the architecture? Keep in mind that these priorities will be based on today’s situation. If the situation changes, then you can reorganize. 4. Decide who’s going to run each group. Notice that this is the fourth step, not the first. You want to optimize the organization for the people—for the people doing the work—not for the managers. Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization. Making this step four will upset your managers, but they will get over it. 5. Identify the paths that you did not optimize. As important as picking the communication paths that you will optimize is identifying the ones that you will not. Just because you deprioritized them doesn’t mean they are unimportant. If you ignore them entirely, they will surely come back to bite you. 6. Build a plan for mitigating the issues identified in step five. Once you’ve identified the likely issues, you will know the processes you will need to build to patch the impending cross-organizational challenges.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
A process is a formal, well-structured communication vehicle. It can be a heavily engineered Six Sigma process or it can be a well-structured regular meeting. The size of the process should be scaled up or down to meet the needs of the communication challenge that it facilitates. When communication in an organization spans across organizational boundaries, processes will help ensure that the communication happens and that it happens with quality.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
But in this case, we had made the mistake of confusing the communication structure with the organizational structure.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration)
Granted, employees are a very different type of customer, one that falls outside of the traditional definition. After all, instead of them paying you, you’re paying them. Yet regardless of the direction the money flows, one thing is clear: employees, just like other types of customers, want to derive value from their relationship with the organization. Not just monetary value, but experiential value, too: skill augmentation, career development, camaraderie, meaningful work, a sense of purpose, and so on. If a company or an individual leader fails to deliver the requisite value to an employee, then—just like a customer, they’ll defect. They’ll quit, driving up turnover, inflating recruiting/training expenses, undermining product/service quality, and creating a whole lot of unnecessary stress on the organization. So even though a company pays its employees, it should still provide them with a value-rich employment experience that cultivates loyalty. And that’s why it’s prudent to view both current and prospective employees as a type of customer. The argument goes beyond employee engagement, though. There’s a whole other reason why organizational leaders have a lot to gain by viewing their staff as a type of customer. That’s because, by doing so, they can personally model the customer-oriented behaviors that they seek to encourage among their workforce. How better to demonstrate what a great customer experience looks like than to deliver it to your own team? After all, how a leader serves their staff influences how the staff serves their customers. Want your team to be super-responsive to the people they serve? Show them what that looks like by being super-responsive to your team. Want them to communicate clearly with customers? Show them what that looks like by being crystal clear in your own written and verbal communications. There are innumerable ways for organizational leaders to model the customer experience behaviors they seek to promote among their staff. It has to start, however, by viewing those in your charge as a type of customer you’re trying to serve. Of course, viewing staff as customers doesn’t mean that leaders should cater to every employee whim or that they should consent to do whatever employees want. Leaders sometimes have to make tough decisions for the greater good. In those situations, effectively serving employees means showing respect for their concerns and interests, and thoughtfully explaining the rationale behind what might be an unpopular decision. The key point is simply this: with every interaction in the workplace, leaders have an opportunity to show their staff what a great customer experience looks like. Whether you’re a C-suite executive or a frontline supervisor, that opportunity must not be squandered.
Jon Picoult (From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans)
Your potential to create wealth is found between your education on how to make money, and your willingness to live in poverty. By education on how to make money, I am referring here to the many skills you need to acquire for a job, in communication, but also organizational and ethical skills. By willingness to live in poverty, I am referring here to the sacrifices you are willing to make. You see, people fear poverty as if they could avoid it, but the one who escapes it faster, is the one who embraces it better. This means spending as less as possible in your habits, not worrying about what others think of you, and committing yourself to become a servant, even a slave, to your higher self. The reason why so many people struggle to accumulate wealth, is because they are avoiding both of these things just mentioned. They don't want to work, for themselves or others, they aren't willing to make sacrifices, they care a lot about what others think of them, they don't want to save any money, they spend without any sense of responsibility, and they also have no interest in investing on their education, either through formal means or by reading books. Most people don't read, they are waiting for the world to offer them the solutions they want, and the trust luck and shortcuts more than they trust their own capacity to achieve things with their own efforts. That's why they can't get to where they want in life. What I just said, can be applied to any other area of life. Even a good marriage requires education on how to make it work and sacrifices to make it work, and just as much as a dog will require you to sacrifice your time and learn better ways of communicating with him. Your own existence depends on a balance of an education on opportunities and a commitment to find them. So what is the most imbecile thing anyone can tell you? The most dumb persons you will ever find, are those who tell you the exact opposite of what I just said, and in doing so, separate everything in different categories. They will say that happiness doesn't require wealth, or that wealthy individuals are miserable. They will say that love requires luck, or that education isn't necessary to become successful. And you have quite a bunch of idiots in this world, marketing their foolish views on others, as if they were absolute truth. You tend to buy into such views with the love and attachment you feel for them. Thus, be wary of the merchants of incompetence. They will try to sell you the most stupid ideas about life. And if you trust them, you will fail, and keep on failing, until you realize you trusted the wrong people. If you think education is expensive, know that stupidity is a lot more. It can cost you an entire existence in the dark. The path to enlightenment is a path of integration, while the distance is measured in segregations. Stupidity is found in the relativity of everything. The dumber one is, the more he or she will think in terms of differentiations. The wiser one is, the more he or she will focus on the similarities and correlations, because enlightenment is found in an upward route towards oneness.
Dan Desmarques
Service journalists. That's how an editor-in-chief described us to a roomful of corporate communicators. We are, he said, purveyors of ideas, of information and inspiration through writing intended to produce a positive response. Call what we do, then, action journalism. Transcending the mere delivery of information, it is writing with the expectation that our readers will act as a result of reading our words. And because of what we expect from them as a result of our efforts, a huge difference separates our kind of writing from the standard journalist's. They report and analyze. We report and advocate. They help sell newspapers and magazines. We help achieve organizational goals by influencing action. We create and enhance employee, shareholder, and customer confidence, build faith in corporate leadership, pride in its products. We heighten employee morale, foster belief in our company's intrinsic worth and trust in its mission. Ours is journalism with a definite slant, specific points of view, ulterior motives, particular objectives, all tilted toward the company, institution, association, or agency employing us.
Lionel L. Fisher
Company Team Buildingis a tool that can help inside inspiring a team for that satisfaction associated with organizational objectives. Today?azines multi-cultural society calls for working in a harmonious relationship with assorted personas, particularly in global as well as multi-location companies. Business team building events strategies is a way by which team members tend to be met towards the requirements of the firm. They help achieve objectives together instead of working on their particular. Which are the benefits of company team building events? Team building events methods enhance conversation among co-workers. The huge benefits include improved upon morality as well as management skills, capacity to handle difficulties, and much better understanding of work environment. Additional positive aspects would be the improvements inside conversation, concentration, decision making, party problem-solving, and also reducing stress. What are the usual signs that reveal the need for team building? The common signs consist of discord or even hostility between people, elevated competitors organizations between staff, lack of function involvement, poor decision making abilities, lowered efficiency, as well as poor quality associated with customer care. Describe different methods of business team development? Company team development experts as well as person programs on ?working collaboratively? can supply different ways of business team building. An important method of business team building is actually enjoyment routines that want communication between the members. The favored activities are fly-fishing, sailing regattas, highway rallies, snow boarding, interactive workshops, polls, puzzle game titles, and so forth. Each one of these routines would help workers be competitive and hone their own side considering abilities. Just what services are offered by the team building events trainers? The majority of the coaches offer you enjoyable functions, coming from accommodation to be able to dishes and much more. The actual packages include holiday packages, rope courses, on-going business office video games, and also ice-breakers. Coaching fees would depend on location, number of downline, classes, and sophistication periods. Special discounts are available for long-term deals of course, if the quantity of associates will be higher. Name some well-known corporate team development event providers within the U.Utes. Several well-liked companies are Accel-Team, Encounter Based Studying Inc, Performance Supervision Organization, Team development Productions, The education Haven Incorporated, Enterprise Upwards, Group Contractors In addition, and Team development USA.If you want to find out more details, make sure you Clicking Here
Business Team Building FAQs
Foolish is the leader whom in the midst of organizational chaos believes since no one is approaching them with issues or concerns then everything must be doing fine. When your Soldiers cease communicating with you are 3ft into a 6ft hole.
Donavan Nelson Butler
A low-context culture is a place where little is left to assumption so things are spelled out explicitly. In contrast, high-context cultures are places where people have significant history together and so a great deal of understanding can be assumed. Things operate in high-context cultures as if everyone there is an insider and knows how to behave. Written instructions and explicit directions are minimal because most people know what to do and how to think. Our families are probably the most tangible examples we have of high-context environments. After years of being together, we know what the unspoken rules are of what to eat, how to celebrate holidays, and how to communicate with each other. Many of our workplaces are the same. We know when to submit check requests, how to publicize an event, and how to dress on “casual” Fridays. New employees joining these kinds of organizations can really feel lost without adequate orientation. And many religious services are also very high context. People routinely stand, bow, or recite creeds that appear very foreign and confusing to someone just joining a religious community for the first time. Discerning whether a culture provides direct and explicit communication versus one that assumes a high degree of shared understanding is a strategic point of knowledge. And leaders need to bear in mind the areas of their own organizational and national culture that are high context and how that affects outsiders when they enter. Table
David Livermore (Leading with Cultural Intelligence: The New Secret to Success)
Dialogue reminds us that we can question to build, not only to doubt or deconstruct.
Oli Anderson (Dialogue / Ego - Real Communication)
Dialogue teaches you to listen through your emotions, not to become distracted or distanced from the truth because of them.
Oli Anderson (Dialogue / Ego - Real Communication)