Joy at Work(er) Blog

Written by Ed Cook

It’s the beginning of the year and you are setting goals - again. We set these annual goals in so many contexts: business goals, fitness goals, financial goals, education goals. Our list is long. You set these goals with such hope for success, only to watch the hope wither as the routine of the year kicks in, just as it has in previous years, keeping your goals unmet. You tend to be ambitious in your goals at this time of the year. Maybe you feel the renewal of the new year. Maybe the time off energizes you. Maybe you simply feel that goal setting is expected in January. Whatever the reason, disappointment often follows.

Ephemeral Expectations

It doesn’t have to be that way. It is possible to set ambitious goals that are meaningful. Goals that, if achieved, would have a positive impact on your life. You can even incorporate the three-letter jargon that so often accompanies goal setting: ROI, KPI, and OKR. (More on those later.) What’s in...

Written by Ed Cook

Perhaps the most consequential business decision of 2021 will be to what extent a business should return to the office. With COVID-19 continuing to impact the planet (and sadly showing signs of a very strong resurgence), it seems likely that we will continue working virtually at least in part. It also seems increasingly likely that as this situation continues, we will never use offices in the way we did two years ago. Virtual work will no longer be for distributed salespeople and a few other job types that make up a fraction of the workforce. It will be for everyone. So how do we do it well?  Answer: With Trust.

 “One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.” -- E.M. Forster

But what is Trust? And, why do we want to build it? Let’s start with trust. We place our trust “in” things and people, as in, “I put my trust in this old car,” or “I put my trust in...

Written by Ed Cook

The words leader and manager often are used interchangeably, and with that slipshod usage, their individual meanings can be lost.  Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis are often quoted as saying:

“Management is doing the things right and Leadership is doing the right thing.”   

This points to deeper insights.  Management is about making things happen. It is literally about manipulation.  The words management and manipulation both come from the Latin word manus, meaning hand.  If done well, there are efficiencies gained and improvements made in every aspect of what the manager’s organization is doing, but that success is circumscribed.  Great managers are still working under constraints that have been given to them.  They can be awesome but only with what is given to them.  Leadership is about seeing beyond the confines and setting a vision for something better.  The origin of the word is...

Written by Roxanne Brown

Written by Ed Cook

As we all scramble because of the COVID-19 outbreak of the coronavirus to move to virtual work that means virtual meetings.  Anything that has not gone well with our in-person meetings is going to go even more horribly with your virtual meetings.  Every distraction, every unfocused agenda item, every meandering conversation without conclusion or action, will be all the more so in a virtual environment.  So let’s use this time of COVID-19 driven separation to make our virtual meetings fantastic.  They can be a source of trust-building as discussed here.  They can even be a way to bring Joy at Work, even more so because so many are anxious about the future.  Now is the time for leaders to step up and be the voice that provides calm and guidance.  Meetings are the place we can do it!

Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings, the better. 
-Peter Drucker

There is significant risk in contradicting a...

Written by Ed Cook

The amount of research on why Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) succeed or fail is voluminous but not particularly clear. M&A is often not successful. Early research focused on strategy and structural factors, but the results were mixed.  More recently cultural factors are the focus, but this opens up significant complexity onto the study of M&A.  Still, the work is revealing.  

Intriguingly, some scholars have found a positive effect between cultural differences and the success level of M&A.  

This finding seems to be explained by the core strategic idea that merging two different sets of capabilities can produce a better performing combined company.  With more skills and a broader knowledge base, the new combined company can more readily succeed. The key activity is capability transfer so that the abilities of the two organizations are combined into the new one.  To get fantastic success means that the...

Written by Ed Cook

In corporations around the globe, managers are engaging in a process to develop their associates. At least they are trying to do it. These well-meaning attempts typically include some sort of a model of competencies. The manager is supposed to “ground” an assessment of the employee’s competencies with behavioral examples when they exhibited higher or lower levels of these competencies, then finally give the employee a score against each competency. There are a few core questions to examine in this system of thought. 

First, what is a competency? So many companies talk about these. Rate their people on these. Determine promotions, bonuses, and raises on these. Companies define competencies like “strategic thinking” and “builds relationships.” These certainly seem useful. Who wouldn’t want an employee to be great at these two competencies and others? Typically, competencies are the more intangible traits that a...

Written by Ed Cook

Written by Ed Cook

Written by Ed Cook