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Rewarding Failure

6 July, 2020 by James Lawther 9 Comments

Should you reward success? Rewarding success is the obvious thing to do. Slaps on the back, public praise, bonuses and honours come easily to us. People expect to be rewarded for good performance.  If you reward success then people will strive to give you more of it. It would be madness to reward failure, or […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: beliefs, Bob Sutton, incentives, mixed messages, motivation, reinforcing behaviour, test and learn

Mental Models and the Long Way to Liverpool

12 June, 2020 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Mental Models We all rely on mental models to guide us through life. They are our maps of reality and we use them to get the best outcomes possible. But where do those models come from and who is to say they are right? A family wedding A few years ago I went to a […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: assumptions, beliefs, communication, human nature, ignorance, learning, mental models

The Art of Managing Complexity

26 May, 2020 by James Lawther 4 Comments

Fire Fighting In the late noughties, Michelle Barton and Kathleen Sutcliffe carried out a study of wildfires in the US.  They were interested in understanding how the firefighters went about managing complexity in their job. The researchers wanted to understand why some fires were well controlled and brought to a swift and happy conclusion, whilst […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: command and control, communication, complexity, culture, gemba, management by wandering around

We Don’t Need Another Hero

30 March, 2020 by James Lawther 2 Comments

Strange times The world has turned upside down.  We are staggering from crisis to crisis.  The word unprecedented is no longer unprecedented.  I might just punch the next person who uses it. Our plans unravel, we have no idea what the future holds and we don’t have a scooby how it is going to end. […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: culture, empowerment, listening, management style

The Management Conundrum

16 March, 2020 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Trust or control? Imagine a scenario where your employees keep on changing things.  All in the name of improvement and innovation.  Everybody is spending time making your organisation run that little bit better.  It sounds great, a management nirvana,  until you realise that they are tinkering with processes, messing with procedures and running roughshod over […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: command and control, compliance, Dilbert, human nature, management style, trust

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