Organizational culture

Organizational culture as described

by E. Schein

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting


Today I was surfing the blogosphere and I stepped by Chad Renando's blog. He posted a quite clear explanation of culture, summing up the book of E. Shein.

I expecially liked the model

Continue to read on: sidewaysthoughts blog

or look for the book




Find book on Amazon

Leadership competencies - Building higly effective teams - Recommended book

The FIVE dysfunctions of a team - P. Lencioni

 

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

 

When, in our consultancy projects, we support teams to improve their effectiveness, we often recommend Leaders to read this book.

 

The book become a common ground of discussion during the working sessions where we help the team to overcome the 5 dysfunctions of a team highlighted by Lencioni.

 

Helpful reading for all leaders and team members.

 

 

 

 

 

Become a good people manager: lesson 4

What is leadership?

By Giorgia Madonno By Marco Polo Consulting

Leadership is the influencing process of leaders anf followers to achieve organizational objectives through change.

Let's discuss the key elements of this definition: 

1) Leaders-followers: In the influencing process of leadership is between leaders and followers,  not just leaders influencing followers, it is a two way street. 

2) Influence. Influencing is the process of a leader communicating ideas, gaining acceptance of them, and motivating followers to support and implementthe ideas through change. Influence is the essence of leadership.  Influencing also is about relationship between leaders and followers. Leaders gain the committment and enthusiasm of followers who are willing to be influenced.

3) Organizational  objectives. Effective leaders influence followers to think not only of their interest but the interests of the organization. Members of the organization need to work together toward an outcome that the leader and the follower both want, a desired future or shared purpose that motivate them toward this more preferable outcome. Leaders need to provide direction. Effective leaders set clear goals. 

4) Change. Influencing and setting objectives is about change. Organizations need to continually change, in adapting to the rapidly changing global environment. Effective leaders realize the need for continual change to improve performance. 

5) People. Leadership is about leading people. effective leaders enjoy working with people and helping them to suceed. 

Leadership managerial roles:

Henry Mintzbetg identified 10 managerial roles that leaders perform to accomplish organizational objectives. He grouped them in 3 cathegories as below: 

Neil Gaiman: 'Face facts: we need fiction' - The Guardian

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

For book lovers there is no doubt about the importance of reading, but just in case anybody has... read this article Continue on The Guardian

Cross-cultural tips - For Italian managers, the Chinese staff do not share opinions enough. Why? What to do?

By Giorgia Madonno - Marco Polo Consulting

During my cross-cultural consultancy in China often Italian managers complain because Chinese staff during meetings do not share opinions enough or do not share with bosses their point of view and do not ask questions.

Why does it happen?

1. Because across cultures the same behavior may have a different meaning.
For Italian people sharing opinions with the boss or during meetings is considered appropriate, even expected. It shows from the employee interest, ideas, proactivity, competence, leadership... but in China this behavior has a completely different meaning. Chinese staff do not share opinions in order to show respect to the boss, to give him/her "face". At school students learn not to give opinions but just answers to precise questions. They learn that the teacher (and then the manager) is the person who has all the answers and cannot be challanged.

2. Because the finality of a meeting in Chinese and in Italian business culture is different. In China meetings are held to share information. The boss communicates his/her decision and then assigns tasks to staff. The opinions from staff are collected before the meeting, often one by one, individually by the boss, possibly by email and the boss, considering them, take decisions.

In Italy meetings are used to brain-storm, to share ideas and come-out with new possible solutions. Often the decision is taken out of the meeting (maybe informally at the coffee machine and communicated by email). For Italians the team discussion is considered very productive when there is plenty of new ideas and solutions to problems. For Chinese people the Italian meeting is messy, unclear, useless.. because no decisions are taken there, because there is not any next steps communication.

Both these approaches are not right or wrong... they are just different. But how to make Chinese and Italians working effectively together with so different points of view?

During our consultancy workshops with Chinese and Italians we always discuss about this issue and we came out with a list of tips that may help (Continue)

HR I-Tech

I-tech for HR: just a fashionable tendency or a real opportunity for improvment?

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consultancy


Every where we find articles, events, books saying i-tech is the new fronteer for HR.

What do you think, is it just a fast "burned" trend or a real and sustanable change of paradigm for HR? 

Read more on the topic:

• Continue on Forbes
• Continue on hrtecheurope.com
• Continue on Forbes about gamification

and tell us your opinion: Go to survey (very short - just 1 question)

 

Leadership competencies - active listening

Active listening is much more than just hearing

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

The Chinese ideogram TING, which can be translated in English as active listening, is an interesting combination of carachters (see below). It teach us that if we want to listen carefully another person, all our attention has to be involved and also all our body: mind/eyes, ears and, heart.
This is an important lesson by Chinese wisdom to everybody, especially people managers, which daily have to practice this difficult skill.

How to build an effective team - Lesson 1 for leaders

Team bulding and situational leadership

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

Teams evolve during time, a good leader should be aware of the group stage of grow and adapt his/her leadership style accordingly. Read the explanation of Tuckman's model  in this article recommended for you. Continue on leadershipthoughts

During an interview, how you explain your experience is key for success: tell it as a STORY

What's your story?











By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

How well do you introduce yourself and your experience to recruiters? Do you just explain listing facts or you  present your professional journey as a compelling story? 
Continue to read the related HBR article

Understanding better your self means better career choices and development

A useful (Free of charges) personality test

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

You can find here below a link that you can use to make a test and understand better your personality. It gives you useful insights to better plan your career or develop your soft-skills. Continue on Findingpotential.com

Marco Polo Consulting training activities

Cross-Cultural training in China by Marco Polo Consulting in Pirelli and Gruppo CMS

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

In August and October we delivered 2 successful cross-cultural training to our clients Pirelli and Gruppo CMS. The objective of the training was to help the teams composed by Chinese, Italian, Brazilian and people from other European countries to improve their working relationship and teamwork. We organized several exercise, games and roleplays to make the training interactive as much as possible. Here below some pics of the key moments.

Pirelli

What great leaders do?

Great leaders are able to create a calm enviroment in situations of crisis

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

Chinese individuals value more than westeners (expecially latin people)  the ability of controlling emotions. They also tend to perform better in environments where leaders transmit a collective feeling of calm and control. Let's see what we can learn from Chinese wisdom and cultural preferences wathching a video by Quy Huy - Insead Professor of Strategy See video on HBR

Self-management

The "workaholic" syndrome is bad for you and also for the company

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

 

As many executives and entrepreneurs I have the tendency to be "workaholic" expecially because (luckily)  I am passionated about my work. Long working hours are the norm for me: passion, research for excellence, pressure from market, clients, project deadlines, iperconnection are only some of the reasons. During my career I learned that this is very dangerous because we do not have unlimited energy and we need to re-charge our batteries in order to have a long-term sustainable job performance. How about you?
On this topic I recommend an interesting article by HBR Continue on HBR

Direct and Indirect communication across Western and Asian cultures

Direct - Indirect communication

"Westerners teach their childrens to communicate their ideas clearly and to adopt a "TRANSMITTER" orientation, that is, the speaker is responsible for uttering sentences that can be clearly understood by the hearer - and understood, in fact more or less independently of the context. It's the speaker's fault if there is a miscommunication.
Asian in contrast, teach their children a "RECEIVER" orientation, meaning that it is the hearer's responsibility to understand what is being said.
If a child's loud singing annoys an American parent, the parent would be likely just tell the kid to pipe down. No ambiguity there.
The Asian parent would more likely to say, "How well you sing a song." At first the child may feel pleased, but it would likely down on the child that something else might have been meant and the child would try being quiter or not singing at all."

Sources: The Geography of Thought How Asian and Westerners Think differently ... and Why" by Richard E. Nisbett

The importance of employee engagement

China business culture books - recommended by us (1)

Chinese business etiquette by Scott D. Seligman

Recommended by Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

Leadership & Career management books - recommended by us (4)

The engagement equation 
Leadership strategies for an inspired workforce
by Christophere Rice, Fraser Marlow, Mary Masarech

Recommended by Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

Do you want to know what engagement is and how to engage your staff? This is a wonderful reading, insightfull and pragmatic. Engagment is an equation of Motivation and Performance and different levels in the organization play different roles in fostering an engaging culture, including the individual because we can createan  engaging environment but we cannot make people engaged, only themselves can do.

Leadership & Career management books - recommended by us (3)

The five dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lencioni

Recommended by Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

Managing effectively an executive team is not a easy task and often unsuccesfull business results come from un unsuccesfull team. Patrick Lencioni in this book describes  the main 5 dysfunctions that teams mostly face and, using a "novel" style, tell us how Kathryn Petersen, newly appointed CEO of fictional company DecisionTech, Inc.ibe solve the issue.

Five dysfunctions of a team:

1. Absence of trust—unwilling to be vulnerable within the group
2. Fear of conflict—seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate
3. Lack of commitment—feigning buy-in for group decisions creates ambiguity throughout the organization
4. Avoidance of accountability—ducking the responsibility to call peers on counterproductive behavior which sets low standards
5. Inattention to results—focusing on personal success, status and ego before team success

Self-learning

Career abroad

The Smart Career Move You Haven't Considered: Working Abroad

By Giorgia Madonno - Marco Polo Consulting

Like the writer of this article in Forbes  my experience abroad has been one of the most interesting choices  in my life. Working and living in 3 continents (America, Europe, Asia) I could cultivate new connections, more open mindset, the ability to see things from different perspectives, a stronger CV and in my case also an entrepreneurial experience that I would never expect to have befor going abroad. Let's see what's more in the below Forbes article

 
Read this article on Forbes by The Muse

Leadership & Career management books - recommended by us (2)

Working identity: unconventional strategies for reinventing your career by Hermina Ibarra



 


How Successful Career Changers Turn Fantasy into Reality Whether as a daydream or a spoken desire, nearly all of us have entertained the notion of reinventing ourselves. Feeling unfulfilled, burned out, or just plain unhappy with what we're doing, we long to make that leap into the unknown. But we also hold on, white-knuckled, to the years of time and effort we've invested in our current profession.

In this powerful book, Herminia Ibarra presents a new model for career reinvention that flies in the face of everything we've learned from "career experts." While common wisdom holds that we must first know what we want to do before we can act, Ibarra argues that this advice is backward. Knowing, she says, is the result of doing and experimenting. Career transition is not a straight path toward some predetermined identity, but a crooked journey along which we try on a host of "possible selves" we might become.

Based on her in-depth research on professionals and managers in transition, Ibarra outlines an active process of career reinvention that leverages three ways of "working identity": experimenting with new professional activities, interacting in new networks of people, and making sense of what is happening to us in light of emerging possibilities. Through engrossing stories-from a literature professor turned stockbroker to an investment banker turned novelist-Ibarra reveals a set of guidelines that all successful reinventions share.

She explores specific ways that hopeful career changers of any background can: " Explore possible selves " Craft and execute "identity experiments" " Create "small wins" that keep momentum going " Survive the rocky period between career identities " Connect with role models and mentors who can ease the transition " Make time for reflection-without missing out on windows of opportunity " Decide when to abandon the old path in order to follow the new " Arrange new events into a coherent story of who we are becoming.

A call to the dreamer in each of us, Working Identity explores the process for crafting a more fulfilling future. Where we end up may surprise us. Herminia Ibarra is Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France.

Become a good people manager: lesson 3

When you move from an individual contributor role to people manager, what is different?

 

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

 

When an individual contributor is promoted to people manager she/he cannot expect to perform well using the same skills than before. This is a common mistake. A new people manager needs to shift her/his values too, because taking care of others become critical and the time spent for it is significant. If this is not perceived as valuable, it is a big problem.

 

Become a good people manager: Lesson 2

Help your people to become great managers

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

In this second lesson dedicated to people management skills, I propose you an article that I recently read, intitled: " Help your people to become great managers" by Peter Economy.

The article is useful for senior managers who want to develop their staff to acquire people management skills and for new people managers who want proactively ask for support to their boss for their skills development. Continue on inc

Become a good people manager: Lesson 1

How to know if being a manager is for you?

By Giorgia Madonno | Marco Polo Consulting

Being a manager is not for everybody. Many high performing and competent specialists, who have been promoted to managerial roles, did not succeede in this new role. Moving from individual contributor to people manager is not easy. How to know if it is for us? We can ask feedback to our boss, to our staff members or we can test our attitude. Try the test posted by Netplace: it is interesting. Continue on netplaces