Author Archives: Paul Myers

10 Ways to Build, or Destroy, Trust

November 5, 2019 9:15 pm ,

One of the primary challenges of leadership is inspiring the trust of others. It is essential when you depend on others to help you achieve a shared goal. For others to follow you, they must see you as someone with positive intentions, whose word is reliable, and who follows through on commitments.

What is trust?
There are four components to trust:

  • Care: Showing benevolence and goodwill toward others, taking an interest in their well-being and goals
  • Credibility: Acting with honesty, integrity, and consistency
  • Competence: Having sufficient expertise to offer solutions and to deliver them
  • Commitment: Demonstrating a long-term orientation to the relationship rather than viewing it as transactional or temporary

Why is trust important?
Trust is the lubricant that makes relationships work smoothly. It is vital to attaining creating a productive and effective team or organization. If you want to have open communication, people must have confidence that bringing bad news won’t be punished. If you want  employees to learn, … Read the rest

Posted in: Leadership

Success Requires Effort, Resilience, and Persistence

October 29, 2019 9:56 pm ,

I spent fifteen years teaching at the Simmons School of Management, and each August the new group of MBA students would take part in a week-long series of classes, discussions, and activities we called Foundations of Business. Most of the faculty made an appearance;  I usually led a case study discussion and also gave my recommendations for how to succeed in the program (and everywhere else, for that matter). My simple advice came from what I had learned as a teacher, my familiarity with some research on learning, and my own personal experience as a student. It boiled down to this: Success requires effort, persistence, and resilience:

success = ƒ(effort)(persistence)(resilience)

Effort: Students need to be prepared for class, complete assignments, seek help when they need it, and engage with their peers. They need to take responsibility for their learning and not expect instructors to do all the work.

Persistence: Each semester’s workload has periods of greater and lesser intensity, … Read the rest

Posted in: Leadership

Ethics and Decision Making

October 5, 2016 3:15 pm ,

There are two ways to think about the relevance of ethics to decision making. The first is making decisions that are ethical; that is, choosing alternatives that are consistent with a set of moral values, norms, and standards. Take a marketing associate who wants to learn consumer opinions about her company’s products. She believes that people will give more honest responses if she says she represents an independent research firm. Her company may be better off if she misrepresents herself, but would doing so be ethical? In a society that values not lying, deciding to disclose her employer’s name is an example of making an ethical decision.

The second way ethics relates to decision making is that some choices involve ethical dilemmas; these involve instances where there are competing claims on what is the “right” thing to do. For example, a hospital may consider closing a costly neighborhood-based clinic for fiscal reasons. Doing so would help the hospital maintain its … Read the rest

Posted in: Decision Making

Effective Knowledge Management: A Framework

September 18, 2016 9:08 pm ,

In the business world, knowledge management (KM) emerged in the mid-1990’s as a key element of process improvement, value creation, and thus overall performance.

A definition of KM: Academics and practitioners alike have written a lot about KM, especially over the past two decades. Most start with defining knowledge itself, often discussing the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge or distinguishing between data, information, and knowledge. Others also present a typology of the means organizations use to create value through knowledge. Few characterizations of KM, however, avoid using the words “knowledge” and “management.” The following definition avoids that tautology and synthesizes common elements found throughout the field:

Knowledge management is a formal approach to acquiring, creating, codifying, storing, sharing and using contextualized information, expertise and other intellectual assets to support achieving an objective.

Together, the processes, activities, practices, organizational arrangements and values associated with this approach make up the KM strategy of an organization. Note that this definition requires a deliberate … Read the rest

Posted in: Knowledge Management

Effective Knowledge Management: Collaboration

September 17, 2016 9:11 pm ,

Effective knowledge management (KM) requires effective collaboration since fundamentally it is about taking what is known by individuals and creating the potential for it to be known by others. Collaboration is a defining characteristic of team based work, and it is especially true for knowledge-intensive functions such as R&D, marketing and customer support.

Three Conditions for Effective Collaboration: A collaborative culture is most likely to emerge when the following three conditions exist:

  1. Trust, transparency and learning are valued
  2. Organizational roles, rules, and rewards support knowledge exchange and learning
  3. People have the skills, motivation and tools to work with others

Three Essential Values: Values are those core set of principles and beliefs that guide action. For effective knowledge management, trust, transparency, and learning are essential because they are integral to collaboration.

  • Trust is the expectation that others will be benevolent, reliable, competent, honest and open. Interpersonal trust is distinct from an organizational climate that values it. In such
… Read the rest
Posted in: Knowledge Management

Effective Knowledge Management: Capabilities

September 17, 2016 9:08 pm ,

This post continues our discussion of knowledge management (KM) by identifying what an organization has to excel at to manage knowledge effectively.

What is a Capability?: A capability is something one is good at or needs to be good at to achieve an objective. For organizations, they are the sum total of the skills and expertise of its people and how they put them to use. To provide an advantage over competitors, an organization’s capabilities need to be unique, or at least difficult to replicate. Thus capabilities are at once strategic for an organization yet derived from attributes of individuals.

Two Types of Capabilities: Knowledge capabilities fall into two categories: those that support current, day-to-day functions (operational capabilities) and those required to adapt to future needs (dynamic capabilities). Each type of capability depends on an infrastructure of technologies, structures, and organizational culture and a set of processes, or activities, that make up the actual work of managing knowledge. These … Read the rest

Posted in: Knowledge Management

Decision Support Systems

September 5, 2016 3:12 pm ,

Many organizations use information technology to improve the effectiveness of their decision making. Known as decision support systems (DSS), these software products transform data into useful information such as statistical tables and comparative results reports (e.g., year-over-year performance). They allow for more objective decision making, improve management control, decrease the need for training through automation, and facilitate communication.

A DSS is made up of a database, a model, and a user-interface provides analysis and answers that help managers make choices. The database consists of structured records such as sales and cost figures. The model links variables that represents an understanding of cause and effect relationships; for example, if wages are increased, the labor cost per unit goes up. The user interface is how decision makers interact with the system; for example, the fields where they enter queries or the series of steps they take to produce graphs, charts, and reports.

Decision support systems are used in a wide variety of … Read the rest

Posted in: Decision Making

Analytics and Decision Making

September 5, 2016 3:10 pm ,

Over the past decade, an increasing number of organizations have started to use decision support systems to predict behavior and results. Predictive analytics enables managers to make decisions about how to allocate resources and take other steps that are most likely to lead to positive results. This approach uses historical data to identify predictive variables. For example, predictive analytics is used in higher education to flag students who are at risk of flunking out based on the pattern of courses and grades that match those of students that have previously had trouble. Those students can then be targeted for support from advisers or tutors. Another example comes from Netflix, the movie rental company. One way Netflix uses analytics is to make recommendations to customers based on their viewing history; this provides additional value to customers and helps with customer retention. Another way the company uses analytics is to predict the number of customers that will want to view each film … Read the rest

Posted in: Decision Making