By Ryan Quinn
A few weeks ago, I got an email from one of the delightful MBA students we have at Darden, where I teach: David Shepro. Based on an idea from an internet video phenomenon in which a guy named Matt goes to sites around the world and dances with people, “Shep,” as I have occasionally heard him called, decided to contact the Darden faculty and staff and ask if he could come to their offices to dance with them. And he captured it on video.
By Robert E. Quinn
In our blog entries, we traditionally take some applied question and show how positive research provides an answer. In today’s entry I would like to do something different. Instead of examining a research finding, I would like to provide a tool. It is a tool that any manager can use to generate an agenda for positive improvement. A teacher or consultant can use it to help managers generate a positive improvement agenda.
I would like to provide the tool for some beta testing. Between now and July 1, 2010, feel free to use it. I encourage you to be as creative as possible. I am anxious to hear about your experiences and learn from your feedback. Please leave us comments with your feedback. Read more »
By Ryan W. Quinn and Shawn E. Quinn
It is common, in the courses we teach about Lift and about Positive Organizational Scholarship, for managers to express frustration. Hearing about positive leadership and positive management can be difficult for people whose organizations do not seem to be positive right now.
In one class, a strategist from the largest business unit in his company expressed frustration because his CEO and the other senior leaders kept saying that they needed new revenue streams, but when he shared with them an idea for a new revenue stream, the CEO said he did not like the idea and told him to not spend any more time on it. The strategist said that this was common. The CEO claimed he wanted new revenue streams, but the culture and practices of the company reinforced the idea that people should not take risks. This strategist was thinking about leaving the company. Read more »
By Robert E. Quinn
Last week I watched a video of a school principal who turned around a failing school. The next day a colleague told me the story of a navy captain who transformed a troubled ship. The next day someone told me the story of the transformation of a manufacturing plant. Each story was inspiring.
I always think of these transformational stories as rare. They are rare in that most troubled organizations stay troubled. Yet it dawned on me that, in the overall scheme of things, organizations are often transformed. These seemingly rare stories occur with some regularity. While each situation is unique and what the leader does is unique, there are some general patterns that occur in every case. The patterns have to do with vicious cycles, virtuous cycles and with positive expectations. Read more »
By Ryan Quinn
I recently spoke about Lift at a conference of administrators from the field of public school education. After I spoke, a woman who was an assistant superintendent approached me. She said that she has been getting multiple calls lately from parents who are complaining about one of the principals in her district. She said that she has tried to help this principal improve relationships like these for years, and she was starting to wonder if it was possible. Obviously, her current strategy for working with this principal was not working. Should she change her strategy but continue to work with the principal? Should she fire the principal? What other options did she have?
This issue is a specific instance of a common problem: How do I manage people when their performance does not meet expectations? And at a blog about the application of Positive Organizational Scholarship, we are inclined to ask specifically if this difficult situation can be transformed into a positive one. Read more »
By Robert E. Quinn
This week I was teaching an Executive MBA course. We were having a particularly stimulating discussion about adaptive confidence, or the ability to move forward into uncertainty, knowing that we will learn our way to an appropriate outcome. One man said, “I totally lacked adaptive confidence. I never did anything without a risk assessment. Then something happened. I changed. I began to do riskier things, always saying, ‘we will figure this out.’ Now my team is also with me. We get to a hard place and they do not stop. They just say, ‘we can figure this out.’” Read more »
By Ryan Quinn
In the past two weeks, I have spoke about the concepts in our book, Lift, to two different audiences. In both cases, people asked me specific questions about how to use the four questions for positive influence to help them manage difficult work relationships. These questions are also relevant to our February 22 blog entry: “Increasing Profit: How Far Should an Executive Go?” In that blog, we use Marcial Losada’s research to discuss how “executives can create more profit by altering how members of the management team relate to each other.” These questions often take the form of, “How can I lift people up when they are always dragging me down?” I will discuss the first if the two examples that people brought to me in these presentations in this blog entry and the second example in a future entry to help us consider answers to this important question. Read more »
By Robert E. Quinn
My last blog entry was titled, “Increasing Profit: How Far Should an Executive Go?” In that last blog entry I pointed out that, in this economy, executives are doing very painful things to produce a profit. I also pointed out that by changing the behavior in their management team, executives could become more profitable. The patterns of social interaction on a management team matter. We have scientific evidence that the members of a management team can behave in one of three ways. In one pattern, the firm will lose money. In the second, the firm will perform like similar firms. In the third pattern, the firm will make much more money than similar firms. All managers have to do to increase profit is to change how team members relate to each other. We would, therefore, expect a great interest in this research.
Unfortunately executives tend to walk away from such findings and we tend to feel disgust as we watch such administrative hypocrisy. Clearly executives do not want profit enough to engage in personal change and learning.
This raises another question. Can those who teach, consult, and work with executives do anything to inspire, encourage, or help executives want to engage in personal change and learning? In trying to increase the capacity of our audiences, how far should a teacher go? Read more »
By Ryan Quinn
I’m am going to begin this blog entry in an unusual way: with two video clips and a challenge. Please watch the clips below (referred to me by my colleague, Gretchen Spreitzer), and then try the challenge I describe beneath them.
CLIP #1
CLIP #2
By Robert E. Quinn
The current economy is most difficult. Firms are struggling to survive and every dollar matters. To save money executives are making brutal decisions that they would prefer not to make. This includes downsizing valued people and outsourcing key processes. For these executives almost every waking hour is focused on the question, “how can we increase profit and decrease costs?” Given these facts, consider the following:
The patterns of social interaction on a management team matter. We have scientific evidence that the members of a management team can behave in one of three ways. In one pattern, the firm will lose money. In the second, the firm will perform like similar firms. In the third pattern, the firm will make much more money than similar firms. All managers have to do to increase profit is to change how they relate to each other. Read more »
