All transitions involve a change in one or more variables to reach a desired goal. Management of change does not happen in a vacuum and there are always external forces at work to exert enough pull to drive the best laid plans off course. In fact, those forces can cause change to happen where none was planned. Many recent college graduates are facing the reality of those forces when searching for work. The first clue… Read More »When Changes Collide
Several years ago, there was a scholarly article published by the Harvard Business Review, The Hard Side of Change Management. As the title implies, much discussion on change management is on soft issues such as culture, leadership, and motivation. While these are unquestionably essential factors, they are not stand-alone tools to implement large transformation projects. The HBR paper used a simple four-point framework that provides a methodology to measure change management. The four key points… Read More »L.O.V.E. It to Change It
The inflated role that human resources professionals profess to have on culture change in the workplace needs to be tempered with a little reality. One of the most important functions in any business is strong, knowledgeable, and professional HR leadership, but in almost all cases they operate by the grace of company executive management that looks to them to be a value added to the decision making process… not to make those decisions. This is… Read More »Managing Culture Change
Simply using the word “Sex†in the title will entice some to check out the article, and others to shun it. In most business cases that word is interchangeable with “gender†which seems to be less offensive to some and more boring to others. Nobody doubts that an adult human being’s sex drive is one of the most powerful urges that can influence thoughts and actions. Everyone has heard the often stated statistic that men… Read More »Workplace Taboo Part V – Sex
The mere mentioning of a name that implies ethnicity can prompt stereotypical responses. A classic experiment reported in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology sent email messages to landlords advertising apartment vacancies in Los Angeles County over a ten-week period. Names that implied Arabic, African American, or White ethnicity were attached randomly to these messages and not surprisingly the “White†names received significantly more responses. We just passed a grim anniversary of the 9/11 attacks… Read More »Workplace Taboo Part IV – Race and Ethnicity