Contrarian Thinking: 2009

Friday, October 02, 2009

Blog Post and Article Recommendations

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Summer's Top 150: Last Installment

It's the last day of summer already, and there you have it: the 150+ blog posts, articles, presentations, podcasts and videos I've come across over the last 3 months. Here's the final installment:

If there's a single link from this Summer's Top 150 you need to check out, this is the one: a great slide show on company culture, and very relevant to the public service.
Forget excellence - Be outstanding!
Realigning Your Role
Owning Your Career
Behavior never lies
Execute or die
Maybe (New Michael Jordan Commercial) - I just like the implication for employees :-)
The New Employee Retention Crisis: Retaining Low Performers
What are you thinking about
Employee Engagement: You Are Not the Boss of Me.
Multitasking, marijuana, managing?
When weak management pushes top performers out the door
Behaving badly
Facebook Friending Policy
5 Ways HR Can Poise a Firm for Growth?
It takes two baby!

Monday, September 21, 2009

Summer's Top 150: Miscellaneous

A bit of everything today...

Henry Mintzberg, my all-time favourite management author, released his new book "Managing" this summer, and it's starting to get some attention. See here, here and here - or this video interview.

HR

Why new hires fail - here are the causes
Do not conduct Exit Interviews
How to Fix Succession Planning

Technology

Resource

Steve Cunningham has a neat website where he summarizes in a short video the key points of the management books he reads. Here's one I liked.
Self-Coaching Guides: Communication, Leadership, Motivation
10 Free Leadership Video Sites

Funny!

Friday, September 18, 2009

Summer's Top 150: Personal Development

It's not just up to our bosses and supervisors to change; we too have something to learn and improve:

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Summer's Top 150: Supervision & Performance Management

I know, I know. This "dump post" includes way too many articles. But the topic is soooo important!

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Summer's Top 150: Employee Engagement

Third installment of the summer's Top 150:

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Summer's Top 150: Change Management

For this second "dump post" of the week, I present you my favourite resources of the summer on change management:

Monday, September 14, 2009

Summer's Top 150: Management Thought

It has been nearly two months since I have posted anything on my blog, and exactly three months since I have shared any article recommendation.

I'm going to make up for the lost time by doing a 6-part blitz of the 150 best articles / blog posts / podcasts / videos that I have come across over the summer. So brace yourself!!!

Gary Hamel's “moonshots for management”, part 1, 2, and 3
Essential Reading for Management Revolutionaries
More Must-Reads for Management Revolutionaries
Management MUST Be Reinvented
Just Managing
The Elitist Undertones of Leadership
Leadership Is Responsibility, Not Power
Rethinking the MBA
Managers Not MBAs: Debating the Merits of Business Education
Searching for balance (Interview with Henry Mintzberg)
Long time blogger Carmine Coyote retires from blogging

Thursday, June 25, 2009

A Not-So-Inconvenient Renewal: What Happens When Managers Change the Way They Manage

If you have been following my work over the last couple of years, you may be wondering if I actually practice what I preach with regards to organization renewal, change management, and most importantly, people management.

Every three years, the federal public service of Canada administers a government-wide survey called the Public Service Employee Survey (PSES). The 2005 PSES was administered just a week before I joined my current organization. The last PSES was administered in November and December 2008, and the results were released a few weeks ago. I have done the analysis, and the results speak for themselves: renewal is possible, and yes, people management does make a difference!

I have just put together a document entitled "A Not-So-Inconvenient Renewal: What Happens When Managers Change the Way They Manage". It presents the dramatic progress made by my organization between 2005 and 2008, as measured by the PSES.

The document is an epilogue to “An Inconvenient Renewal: Are Public Service Managers Ready to Change the Way They Manage?”, a paper I released in 2007 in which I stressed the importance of good people management and argued that while top-down change has its merits, many of the things that would make the most significant and palpable difference don’t happen at the top of the organization, but rather at the field level in the everyday interactions between managers and their employees.

I hope the PSES results will convince you that when managers change the way they manage, the ripple effects can be felt throughout the organization. To learn more about the renewal efforts in my organization, you may browse through some of the links featured in the side-bar of my blog under the header "My Websites, Papers, and Other Initiatives".

Enjoy you reading, and please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any question.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Awesome Reading Recommendations

I've been away for the last two weeks, both for work and leisure. When I returned I had over 300 articles waiting for me in my RSS reader. I managed to process them all, and here are my top recommendations, arranged by themes:

On Staffing:

On Thinking:

On Collaboration:

On creativity and innovation:

On Leadership:

Miscellaneous:

And my favourite quote of the week:

"If you perform at your personal best, doing everything possible to make a success of the immediate situation, then doing it as a ‘leader’ or a ‘follower’ has no meaning." (Miki Saxon)

Saturday, June 06, 2009

Dump Post: New Format

I'm back from a short but activity-packed vacation in Tofino with my old friend Patrick Di Fruscia who I had not seen in nearly 10 years. In addition to being a great travel companion, Patrick taught me a few photography tricks and as a result, I felt like my pictures improved in a matter of just a few days. Still, I have quite a bit of work to do before I can catch up to the level of his talent.

Speaking of photography, a new picture of the Tiananmen Square protests' "Tank Man" was published last week. I have used the photo seen across the world in one of my presentation to illustrate courage, but I find this new picture even more dramatic, as "Tank Man" can be seen walking towards the tanks, while everyone else is running in the opposite direction. I wonder what happened to him. I hope someday we will find out.

Some readers have written to me asking for a brief description of what the links I recommend are about. I'm testing the new format. Here we go:

I've never been a big fan of the "symphony conductor as leader" analogy, but this post is actually quite good: 8 Things Leaders Can Learn from Symphony Conductors.
Ann Bares asks "whether we should focus on being the best places or the best high performance places to work" in Rewards Metrics: Engagement versus the Bottom Line.
Carmine Coyote offers a very interesting perspective on motivation in Musings About Motivation and Mike Chitty responds.
Lots of interesting comments to Gary Hamel's post about "deep-seated impediments". The one left by Kausar Fahim especially rings true with me.
MBAs have been getting a pretty bad rep lately, and this podcast entitled MBA: Most Bloody Awful explains why.
Want to learn how to make a good presentation? Here are some lessons learned from TED and Change This, and Six Secrets of Top Communicators.
Art Petty offers a common sense approach to management in general and project management
Chris Brogan distinguishes between audience and community.
Mark Gould navigates the seven Cs of knowledge.
David Eaves discusses Public Service and Citizen Engagement in the Information Age.
Three ways to impress your employees
In what I found to be one of the most profound presentations ever made at TED, Liz Coleman issues a call to reinvent liberal arts education and criticizes the fact that "the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment". Watching her talk, I could think of quite a few implications for change management and the federal public service.

Your feedback is always appreciated.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

A Bigger One!

I know some of you would like me to comment on each link I share in these "dump posts" or at least give a snippet for what the article is about, but that will have to wait (I just can't make the time for it right now)! In the meantime, enjoy the best of the last week:

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

A Big One!

Many good articles to recommend this week:

Sunday, May 03, 2009

This Week's Recommendations

And some humor:

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Some "Must-Read" Posts

A short selection of the finest posts I ran into in the past week:

Also, I couldn't help to read over and over this quote from the New Zealand public service's Principles for interaction with social media:

"As an agency representative: The protocols that apply when you are acting as an official representative of your agency are the same whether you are talking to the media, speaking at a conference or using social media. Good practice is to disclose your position and that you are representing your agency. You should only disclose information, make commitments or engage in activities when you are authorised to do so. You should remember that your comments will often be permanently available and able to be reproduced in other media."

Hum... where do I fit in this?

Have a good week!

Friday, April 24, 2009

The "Digital Water Cooler"

If you haven't already done so, go to CSPSRenewal to read their latest column where they comment on the work of Andrew Keen and draw parallels with GCPEDIA. I believe it is one of their finest posts (at least on par with this other favourite of mine)... and I really liked the "digital water cooler" analogy!

I often laugh at some of the discussion that goes around the water cooler, because the people engaging in them seem to believe that they can solve the world's problems (or at least all the organization's problems!). Of course, rarely any action results from these chats. But what I find fascinating about the "digital water cooler" is that many conversations have actually turned into concrete actions!

That being said, there is some truth to Andrew Keen's controversial quote reported in the post:

“... we use the Web to confirm our own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies. Bloggers today are forming aggregated communities of like-minded amateur journalists … where they congregate in self-congratulatory clusters. They are the digital equivalent of online gated communities where all the people have identical views and the whole conversation is mirrored in a way that is reassuringly familiar. It's a dangerous form of digital narcissism; the only conversations we want to hear are those with ourselves and those like us.”

Although I don’t like his statement, I must admit that I am guilty of "congregating in self-congratulatory clusters" (i.e. with my friends from CPSRenewal, GC20, etc.). Indeed, it can be construed in part as a form of narcissism. But it must be contrasted with its opposite (i.e. the absence of congregation) in order to be fully appreciated.

Novel ideas are seldom popular, especially if they challenge:

The status quo;
What has worked well for people in the past;
What brought these people success;
What characterized the environment that enabled them to succeed.

(For more on this, allow me to indulge in some "self-congratulatory behaviour" and refer you to this post.)

There’s no denying that the vocal minority of individuals upholding new ideas do enjoy sharing with like-minded people and actually need the interaction. But it is much more than simply navel-gazing, or merely a form of support group. I believe it is a necessary step to refine these novel ideas, give them strength, and craft the messaging around them so that they become accessible to and understood by the majority of people who don’t share them yet.

I am one of those individuals who is always looking for great “pieces of writing that will bolster my position”. This is exactly my intent with most of the links I share on this blog. For every great article I come across written by a like-minded blogger, I have reviewed at least 10 to 20 other posts that did not support my position, and I’m not even talking about all the articles that support exact opposite position. In other words, I’m 100% biased, and that is why I have a blog.

As David Eaves suggests, the beauty of blogs is that "they sift through the information that is out there and tease out what is important and what is relevant and write it up in a readable and accessible fashion." If you accept the inherent bias of blogs (and I am definitely not suggesting that blogs are more biased than newspapers or other media), blogs can be a goldmine of information and insight.

Blogging, like so many other editorial forms, filters the information to make it relevant for readers. Furthermore, blogs - just like books or any other media - offer something that readers are looking for: perspective. That's where bloggers offer a unique value: they provide a storyline, a rationale, a logical argument that articulates what people are feeling, a framework for thinking about complex issues. Most people don't run short of opinions; what they sometime lack though are the arguments that would give weight to their opinions and a narrative to tie these arguments together. The purpose of a blog is not to be objective, but to offer a point-of-view.

In that regard, there's no question that Web 2.0 levels the playing field between "amateurs" and "professionals". But no matter in which camp you fall, credibility remains a key currency. The democratizing power of the Web closes the credibility gap between professionals and amateurs. This can be worrisome for professionals whose status is at risk of losing ground. Let's now consider the federal public service and GCPEDIA.

The public service’s highly professional workforce is composed in large part of specialists: experts in their respective domain. Traditionally, it takes years before one can establish him or herself as an expert - approximately 10,000 hours as Malcom Gladwell and Geoff Colvin suggest. But while historically, one would get these 10,000 hours from their day job, the rules have changed and people can now develop their expertise on the corner of their desk or after-hours.

Enters GCPEDIA, and more broadly, the democratization of the Web. All of a sudden, the old rules no longer applied. The accomplished experts and specialists who, up until this point, pretty much decided what information and ideas would get filtered in or filtered out, no longer have a monopoly on knowledge and now face some competition of their own in the form of “amateur” experts and specialists, thanks to GCPEDIA and social networking websites in general. Anyone with a brain and a perspective can now have meaningful influence and develop and expertise.

Personally, GCPEDIA has been hugely beneficial in allowing me to share information, knowledge and perspectives that would otherwise (and in fact has been) filtered through the chain of command or by process gate-keepers. Now it is made accessible to anyone and everyone. Scary thought? You decide ;-)

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The Case for Managing Employee Performance

One of the recurring themes in my presentations (“Bottom-Up Renewal”, “Living Renewal”) as well as in my writings (“An Inconvenient Renewal”, this blog) has been performance management, more specifically: managing the performance of employees.

Today I made a presentation to my department’s PS Renewal Committee on this topic. I have uploaded the PowerPoint on GCPEDIA. For those of you who don’t have access to GCPEDIA, here’s the gist of it:

Firstly, it is important to distinguish between performance management as in “organization performance” vs. “employee performance”. The two concepts are interrelated, but have very different implications for supervisors.

Secondly, despite all the criticism against bureaucracy, the “public service of Canada employee performance management framework” (i.e. legislation, TBS policies and guidelines, collective agreements, etc.) is simple and straightforward. One of the most compelling quotes I came across actually comes from this overview of the Financial Administration Act:

“Performance management is a key enabler of effective human resources management and the achievement of organizational effectiveness and results. Effective performance management fosters integration of employee performance with organizational goals and results; engagement, responsibility and accountability for on-the-job performance and organizational results; and, fairness, consistency and transparency in the treatment, recognition and promotion of people. Integral to performance management are leadership, communication, coaching, mentoring, learning, development and recognition. Performance management results in a work culture in which excellence in performance is encouraged and recognized, and unsatisfactory performance effectively managed.”

Many tools and resources are available to supervisors to manage employee performance and hone their skills. Nevertheless, employee performance management is not valued and practiced as much as other management activities (i.e. financial management). There is currently a strong push for employee performance management in the public service. However for some reason people management in general is still not something that is commonly measured.

But if:

the management of employee performance and organizational performance are interdependent...
the management of employee performance is the responsibility of every supervisors...
the prescriptions and instruments for the management of employee performance are built into legislation, collective agreements, TBS guidelines, policies and directives, and departmental policies...
and the tools and resources for the management of employee performance are widely available to all public servants...

...Why is the management of employee performance a major weakness throughout most of the public service?

Is it because:

Organizational performance is possible without employees?
Employee performance management is less important than organizational performance management?
We tolerate poor employee performance management where we would never allow poor financial management?
Employee performance management is just optional?

Managing employee performance management is simple. The hard part is actually doing it, because most: s

Most supervisors are not appointed in their role based on their ability to manage employee performance;
Supervisors must manage employee performance every single day (as opposed to once a year);
Supervisors must be willing to have difficult conversations with employees;
Supervisors must practice truth-telling;
Supervisors must make unpopular decisions;
Supervisors must face their greatest fears.

With this in mind, the rest of my presentation focuses on the steps my organization has taken to make the management of employee performance a priority and “raise the bar”.

As potential solutions, I also offer the following:

Give employee performance management as much importance as we give to organizational performance management.
Be as diligent and rigorous with people management as we are with financial management (both of which, ironically, derive their authorities from the FAA).
Increase focus on day-to-day management of employee performance (not just on the annual performance appraisals).
Appoint people in supervisory roles based on their people management skills, their ability to manage employee performance, and their willingness to have difficult conversations with employees.
If supervisors are able to do the single most difficult aspect of their job well (i.e. managing performance of employees), the rest should follow naturally.

I'm considering turning this presentation into a "talk"... Does it make sense? Is the PS ready for this?

Your feedback is always appreciated.

Thanks!

Monday, April 20, 2009

Last Week's Best

I came across lots of interesting blog posts and links in the past week:

"My company previously used performance reviews that looked at “soft” skills only. We found through analysis that we could basically determine what an employee’s score would be by knowing who their supervisor was. The score was a reflection of the supervisor, not the employee."

You may also check out the original study. Here's the gist of it:

"In this article, we argue that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation."

I am waiting impatiently for the released of the 2008 Public Service Employee Survey results. More than four months have elapsed since the survey was administered and it appears it will take another month to get the results. Hum... If you want to know how I feel about this, check out this video.

Please vote for your three favourite pos ts on ContrarianThinking.ca if you haven't already done so! The poll is in the side-bar, at the top.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

A Bit of Everything

Here's a list of the best blog posts, articles, videos and other resources I came across this week. There's some really good stuff in there, so take the time to go over each of them:

Also, my friend Asif has put together a video in which he explains a phenomenon bloggers like me are all too familiar with - lurking - and offers some interesting insight.

Saturday, April 04, 2009

Misc. Blog Posts, Part 6: Mishmash

Well, this is the last post of blog recommendations I wanted to share. Whether you found them interesting, enlightening, thought-provoking or simply entertaining, I hope you got something out of it. I'll keep tracking a number of blogs and share the best posts with you on an ad-hoc basis.

And as a bonus: 84 Things To Live By

Friday, April 03, 2009

Misc. Blog Posts, Part 5: Humour

Since it's Friday, a little reward:

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Misc. Blog Posts, Part 4: Generational Issues

Alright, I have a full post on generational issues that I have been delaying for quite some time now, so in the interim, enjoy these few links:

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Misc. Blog, Part 3: Career Advice

Today's selection:

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Misc. Blog Posts, Part 2: More on Management

As you know, this is probably my favourite topic, so I have more blog posts recommendations than usual. Don't panic, it's still early in the week, so you'll have time to read them all by Friday ;-)

Monday, March 30, 2009

Misc. Blog Posts, Part 1: Management Thought Evolution

This week I give you the final blitz of blog posts recommendations. This collection of articles may seem a bit disjointed, but I have managed to group most of them by topics. So here were go with the first: management thought evolution.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Living Renewal: Powerpoint Available on GCPEDIA

Quite a few people have been asking for the Powerpoint of last week's presentation at the CSPS Armchair Discussion. It is now available on my GCPEDIA page.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Bottom-Up Change: Comments and Feedback

Please give me your feedback about the presentation by using the comment feature below.

Thank you!

Friday, March 20, 2009

Bottom-Up Change: Video Rebroadcast

If you couldn't attend the original session taped on December 11, 2008, you will be happy to know that CSPS is rebroadcasting "Bottom-Up Change: It Starts With An Individual" on March 26, 2009, in both French and English.

Go to the CSPS Armchair Discussions website to register!

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Living Renewal: Comments and Feeback

Please give me your feedback about today's presentation by using the comment feature below.

Thank you!

Sunday, March 15, 2009

The Manager’ Series, Part 6: Miscellaneous Advice

Last post of this series on management!

Not quite blogs, but worth the read:

Friday, March 13, 2009

Management, Part 4: Traps, Pitfalls and Things to Avoid

Today we flirt with the "dark" side:

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Management, Part 3: Succession Planning

Looking ahead:

Since I am calling on you to think about the future, please watch this short TED presentation. You'll be drooling with envy at the idea of one day using this cool gadget...

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Management, Part 2: Managing Performance

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Management, Part 1: Advice for New and Future Managers

Does Blogging About Leadership & HR Help? I hope so.

Last week David Eaves had a post entitled "Why the government of canada needs bloggers" in which he stated that "[blogs] sift through the information that is out there and tease out what is important and what is relevant and write it up in a readable and accessible fashion."

In the same vein, I have sifted through thousands of blog postings to bring you in this six-part series what I think are the 100 very best on the topic of management. So let's begin with some advice for new and future managers: