How leaders kill meaning at work - McKinsey Quarterly - Leadership

As a senior executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organization who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle,¹ found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.

Even incremental steps forward—small wins—boost what we call “inner work life”.....More and to read the full article click here

Finding the right place to start change - McKinsey Quarterly - Organization - Change Management

Changing an entire large organization is never easy; only about a third of all such transformations succeed. One problem many organizations run into as they implement a change program is faltering momentum because employees just don’t change the way they work. Sometimes they don’t want to, and sometimes the reason is a poorly structured plan that makes change harder. Our recent experience at a European retail bank shows the benefits of starting to implement change by focusing on the employees who have the most influence over the daily work that needs to change. This approach can ensure that a successful transformation happens faster and that employees remain engaged in the long term.

This is a well researched article from McKinsey's. Whilst it is not ground breaking, it is worth a read just to remind yourself about what you do know about change.

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Practically Radical: Four Simple Truths about Leading Change and Making a Difference - William C. Taylor

“We are living through the age of disruption. You can’t do big things if you’re content with doing things a little better than everyone else or a little differently than how you did them before. In an era of hyper-competition and non-stop dislocation, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something special. Today, the most successful organizations don’t just out-compete their rivals. They redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world filled with me-too thinking.”

Read William's full manifesto here courtesy of Change This.

About William C. Taylor | William C. Taylor is an agenda-setting writer, speaker, and entrepreneur who has shaped the global conversation about the best ways to compete, innovate, and succeed. He is the cofounder of Fast Company, which published its premiere issue 15 years ago, and the coauthor of Mavericks at Work, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. His new project, Practically Radical, is the latest chapter in a two-decade career devoted to challenging conventional wisdom in business and helping business leaders win. Practically Radical was published on January 4, 2011 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. Bill blogs about the book at practicallyradical.com. A graduate of Princeton University and the MIT Sloan School of Management, he lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with his wife and two daughters.

The change-capable organization and the importance of metrics - accenture

One of the odd paradoxes of organizational change is that all the initiatives companies undertake to support major transformations—learning programs, structural changes, communications plans and the like—can actually prevent effective change as much as enable it. The enemy is time. It may take months to bring a team on board to design and execute a change program, then several more months to make the transition to a new way of working. By that time, who can be sure the initiative is even relevant to the real business issues of the day? Maybe, instead, the change program ends up being more like last year’s fashions—handsome and well crafted, but out of date.

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The psychology of change management - McKinsey Quarterly - Organization - Change Management

Companies can transform the attitudes and behavior of their employees by applying psychological breakthroughs that explain why people think and act as they do. Over the past 15 or so years, programs to improve corporate organizational performance have become increasingly common. Yet they are notoriously difficult to carry out. Success depends on persuading hundreds or thousands of groups and individuals to change the way they work, a transformation people will accept only if they can be persuaded to think differently about their jobs. In effect, CEOs must alter the mind-sets of their employees—no easy task.

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