Management gemsFind here some gems from our monitoring of the best publications on leadership and management

Legendary basketball coach John Wooden is quoted as having once said: “Never mistake activity for achievement.” And yet, within our companies, a kind of cult of hyperactivity often exists. It is considered good form to show that you are always busy, even overwhelmed. Is this not a sign of being indispensable, at the heart of critical projects? Of course, your effective workload has an incompressible impact on your schedule. But it is also common to measure a person’s level of commitment and contribution by how busy they appear to be.

This over-valuation of hyperactivity has high individual and collective costs. Professional burnout syndrome, bureaucratic overload, diminished creativity…: the consequences of this frenzy are numerous. So, what if you rehabilitated the value of downtime or less directly productive moments? Here are some actions you can initiate to get the ball rolling:

– Create slots of time within the team’s agenda during which meetings are forbidden.

– As a manager, dare to take breaks conspicuously.

– Encourage your team members to do the same and to take advantage of breaks to truly disconnect—for instance by stepping outside for some fresh air.

Source: Beware a Culture of Busyness, Adam Waytz, Harvard Business Review, March-April 2023.

Putting an end to projects or cutting loose from historical activities is always difficult. And yet it is a practice that distinguishes companies that are lastingly over-performing. The logic is rather intuitive: perpetuating dead-end projects only disperses resources and undermines the company's ability to invest in more solid avenues. Nonetheless, in practice, many biases make this process difficult. Consulting firm PwC has identified four practices that can help make the divestment exercise more natural and more effective:

- Implementing standardized and regular portfolio evaluations. The cadence is important to making this a habit.

- Carrying out an in-depth review of each project in the portfolio, including the analyses of historical financial data, but also of extra-financial information and of the current and future competitive environment. Many companies stop with the first of these analyses.

- Involving the board of directors in these assessments. The study shows a significant positive impact of this involvement on the likelihood of companies considering divestments. The involvement of the board also speeds up the implementation process.

- Working on reinvestment plans in parallel. Identifying other avenues to be pursued once existing projects are closed helps to counter the status quo bias, by making the opportunity cost visible.

Source:  The power of portfolio renewal and the value in divestitures, PwC US, March 2023.

Currently, most companies are pondering how they can best take advantage of AI at their own scale. Applications and experiments are thus flourishing, with varying degrees of success. Very often, the frustrations are commensurate with the hopes. And with good reason: AI, however "intelligent" it may be, can ultimately only do one thing—work from the data we provide it with. To capitalize on it, we therefore need centralized data of sufficient quality and quantity, and derived from a wide range of sources. In many organizations, however, this data is scattered among various business functions, each of which has its own systems.

So, before considering sophisticated generative AI set-ups, it is useful to carry out a quick diagnosis of your organization. Is tacit knowledge sufficiently formalized? Is it centralized? Are data collection and processing methods sufficiently standardized? Given the nature and quantity of the data collected, is there a risk of triggering biased responses from your AI system? Would you benefit from access to additional sources? This upstream work is essential to ensuring the quality of the AI's responses and maximizing its potential to help decision-making.

Source:  Harnessing AI to accelerate digital transformation, The Choice by ESCP, July 2023.

Interviews with people leaving the company represent a mine of information that too often goes unexploited. They are an essential moment to collect data about the causes of employee departures. When properly conducted, these interviews can help identify dysfunctions, detect the low-key generalization of unsatisfactory behavior, and identify possible levers for building loyalty.

To that end, discussions must be able to be frank and critical, while also remaining constructive. This quality of exchange is difficult to achieve when emotions are still raw, or when employees are concerned that expressing themselves too forthrightly will lead to not getting their former employer’s recommendation.

One good practice consists in slightly pushing back the timing of this interview, within the limits of what is possible. In this respect, studies show that exit interviews held two to six weeks after the end of employment are often the most fruitful. They benefit from greater perspective and objectivity on both sides. The more neutral tone allows deeper probing of the true causes of dissatisfaction. In these more favorable conditions, some managers and HR experts even report feeling they have taken part in a genuine and shared brainstorming session on the solutions. 

Source: The Biggest Mistake Companies Make in Exit Interviews, William Mahan, Work Institute, August 2023.

The voice is one of a leader’s essential tools. Far more than we think, it shapes perceptions and contributes to the quality of interactions. An American study conducted on presidential candidates showed that the simple fact of altering their voice through a computer program had an impact on voting intentions. In the corporate world, executives testify that it is far more difficult to rise through the ranks and assert yourself to your teams with a thin voice.

Fortunately, it is possible to learn to play with the timbre and tone of your voice, to modulate its rhythm and volume according to situations, for instance to restore calm during a turbulent meeting or to refocus a tense press conference. You must also be sure to periodically rest your voice, in order to avoid vocal breakdown. A classic problem according to executives, who state they spend their time talking—sometimes to the point of voicelessness!

Consequently, more and more companies are calling on the services of speech therapists to help their managers learn to tame their voices. Singing or acting lessons are also offered. This enables in-depth work to be conducted on people’s vocal capacities and helps to collect ideas for exercises or micro-routines to sustain them over time.

Source: Un bon dirigeant doit assurer vocalement [Good leaders must be vocally assertive], Christophe Haag, Harvard Business Review France, October 2014.