Webcast:
Innovation is the lifeblood of any organization and the way that organizations respond to new ideas will determine whether they can become leading edge institutions or stay stuck in the status quo. In particular, empowering leaders to unleash innovative practices in their own teams is an integral part of tapping into the creativity of their employees. Stakeholders must be managed and leaders empowered to ensure that new practices are not sabotaged or allowed to drift into irrelevance once implemented.
In this webcast, Dr. Sydney Smith-Heimbrock of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management shares how organizations can develop the kind of leaders who will foster innovation and sustain it in the long term.
Webcast on Demand
On-demand webcasts are available to executive members. Please log in or sign up as an executive member to view this webcast.
Presenters
Sydney Smith-Heimbrock directs the Office of Personnel Management’s Leadership and HR Development Solutions Center in the Division for HR Solutions. As LHRD Director, Dr. Smith-Heimbrock leads the Federal Executive Institute and OPM’s management development centers, providing classroom-based and customized executive and management development services for all federal agencies, as well as state, local and foreign government organizations and officials.
Prior to this position, Dr. Smith-Heimbrock served OPM for five years leading the Federal government’s Strategic Human Capital Management initiative. In this capacity she developed government-wide standards and assessed agency performance as part of the President’s Management Agenda. She led the Federal Executive Board (FEB) program, the annual President’s Quality Awards, and OPM’s Administrative Law Judge program.
Dr. Smith-Heimbrock brings 20 years of public- and private-sector senior management experience in human capital development, performance management, and government reform worldwide. As a senior management consultant, she designed and conducted performance management training for government clients throughout the United States and internationally. During her previous federal service, Dr. Smith-Heimbrock served as the U.S. Department of Labor’s Director of International Technical Cooperation, leading global workforce development and government reform programs in partnership with the International Labor Organization, the World Bank, the Department of State, USAID and other key agencies.
Dr. Smith-Heimbrock earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Miami University of Ohio, concentrating in Public Administration and Comparative Politics. She holds degrees from the London School of Economics and Political Science, Syracuse University and Stanford University. Dr. Smith-Heimbrock has published and presented numerous papers on public policy and human capital development, and conducted original research on the competencies required to govern by network. She is currently Chair-elect of the American Society of Public Administration (ASPA)’s Section on Personnel Administration and Labor Relations (SPALR) and Advisory Board member of the Review of Public Personnel Administration.
I would like to second what Peter Hunter has said and add from my experience.
I used the standard authoritarian approach to managing people. I spent the vast majority of my time figuring out what needed to be corrected and what needed to be initiated, the giving the orders I felt necessary to achieve those.
What I did not realize was that my actions naturally demotivated and demoralized employees because they were perfectly capable of figuring out what to do, when to do it and how to do it if I would only provide them with reasonable support. What I did not realize was that orders are the most destructive action any boss can take with employees, destructive of their motivation and commitment.
After 12 years of living with a lot of poor performance I had unknowingly created, I changed to listening to my people and responding respectfully to their complaints, suggestions and questions. The more I did this, the better they performed eventually to a point at least twice what I had even dreamed possible. With a slight modification, I doubled even that performance thus learning that people are about 4 times more capable than we give them credit. They literally loved to come to work and were able to crush their competition.
The videos and articles at my website explain this approach to managing people. It is not based on what leaders do but on what followers follow and how people react to managerial actions and inactions. These are what people always do regardless of what executives and managers think they should do. "Should" never works on any day of the week.
Ben Simonton
http://www.bensimonton.com
In the best possible conditions created for change by management, the workforce know that they just have to wait until management get bored with their latest "Initiative du jour," then their attention will wander to something else and the status quo will reassert itself.
Their initiative is consigned to the collective management experience that tells us, up to 95% of these initiatives never have any lasting effect on the workforce.
Management do not even consider themselves to blame for this startling statistic, it is just the way that it has always been. They don't consider being a part of this statistic a failure, just more evidence of the intransigence of their workforce.
What their collective experience does not tell them is what they should be doing in order to make change sustainable.
They cling to the hope of being one of the five per cent as if it was some kind af lottery, not a deliberate management strategy.
Management have no knowledge of any strategy they could implement that would allow them to control whether or not they made it into the five per cent.
Sustainability starts not with a change programme but with the way the workforce feel about what they do. The failures can in the main be put down to the fact that the workforce do not want to support management.
This is because they are being told to implement changes by the same management who have told them to implement a dozen similar schemes in the past none of which have had any noticeable effect other than to make their jobs more difficult to do.
The workforce in general do not trust management to know what is the right thing to do and they do not trust them to support the workforce, thus any management driven programme will fail, not because it is flawed, it may not be, but because it comes from management.
To sustain change the change must come from the workforce.
When the change is their idea the workforce know that it will work and because it belongs to them they will support it.
Additionally, if for some reason the change does not work the workforce, because the change is their idea, will pull the plug on it and look for another way to address the problem.
The management solution, when something does not appear to be working, is to simply pour more time and money into it until they run out of either or both.
Peter A Hunter
www.BreakingtheMould.co.uk