What if people are not your most important asset?
In devoting our time to the efficient working order of the parts, we forget that all firms are just webs of relationships between people.
What does craft brewing tell us about a future public sector career?
The drivers behind the consumer thirst for craft beer and employee desires for more open career paths are similar and worth exploring.
Workforce infrastructure is critical to performance
The principal barriers to workforce transformation are change-resistant leaders and insufficient knowledge and talent to reshape workforce structures and systems to meet the new environment. In a competitive labour market, the workforce won’t wait long.
If you think you’re in a ‘battle’ for talent, you’re fighting the last war
The stock and flow of a workforce is a narrow and limited measure. The drivers of workforce capacity are behavioural.
Rabbit or duck? We need a sensible conversation about the public sector workforce
We need to steer the conversation about APS workforce capability away from the extremes and focus on the actual problem.
The importance of learning to transformation
The position of work in our lives is significant, so learning through work potentially makes a disproportionately large contribution to the growth and identity of the individual. Do we need a better approach to L&D at work?
The unending quest for the ‘perfect’ organisational culture
The perfect culture promises unimaginable employee engagement, performance, and productivity benefits. However, the quest seems to have no end, and the longed-for benefits seem just as unattainable. What if our quest is based on a false assumption?
Striving for a common sense view of organisation
Reform, change and adaptation are sweeping the public and private sectors alike. We need a commonsense view of our organisations that doesn’t rely on the machine model.
Reflecting on performance appraisals…
Performance appraisal is a surprisingly recent but amazingly persistent management fad that remains in most organisations in nearly the same form as it originated.
On why organisations are like platypuses
Our organisations are much like the platypus, a collection of specialist adaptations.
We must do more than just polish the parts to improve organisational performance
Our greatest challenge is to think past the comfort of our own experience of work to entertain the possibility that the way we work could be better.
Accountability and trust...
Can we better frame a conversation about accountability? A conversation that allows us to see accountability as a relationship rather than a penal code. And one where we can think about accountability as an organisational and leadership choice in managing control and delegation.
Do we distance people from work?
Have we designed work that distances people from participating meaningfully in work? If so, we may need to think more about what shapes how work is done and our relationship with work.
On the supposed apathy and disengagement of middle managers…
It is not uncommon to hear that the intransigence of middle managers is the principal barrier to implementing change in organisations. Is that fair?