Check out these great leadership development posts

Dan McCarthy, the founder of the Leadership Development Carnival over at Great Leadership, has posted the May 1st edition of the carnival. Dan has assembled over 30 contributed posts on a huge range of Leadership topics and has also written a helpful, brief intro to each, so check it out.

Some notable posts include:

• Wally Bock‘s You don’t “build” people, dammit!
• Art Petty’s Trying Not to Fail Is Not the Same As Striving for Success
• Mark Stelzner’s Will I Fit In?
• Laura Schroeder’s Top Ten Tips for Managers
• Meg Bear’s Bring your whole self to work

This Leadership Development Carnival offers a terrific opportunity for you to get a great sample of a variety of perspectives, thinking, and just plain good writing. It can also save you time by bringing them all together into one post. And who knows? Maybe you’ll discover a great blog you never heard of before.

Creativity…

…. helps artists die young, miserable and penniless so their art can have meaning to the old, satisfied and obscenely rich.

So says my Demotivators Calendar for the merry month of May.

For organisations, creativity as a “one-man show” is a harmful myth according to this recent article in People Management, the monthly journal of the UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) – Organisational Learning: The Social Network

“HR has been obsessed with high-performing individuals for too long. The real engine of creativity and organisational success is to be found in internal networks of friendship and collaboration …

… countless examples demonstrate that the generation of creative ideas is mainly a collaborative process rather than merely an intrapersonal one …

… numerous empirical studies have also demonstrated that social network ties are of crucial importance for the generation of creative ideas and other key knowledge-related activities…”

The article advocates putting emphasis in the management of creativity primarily on collaborative relationships between creative individuals. Why is this important to HR professionals? Creativity contributes to new products and services and therefore helps the organisation achieve sustainable competitive advantage, and  creativity is genuinely a people business. In short, HR can demonstrate the value of nurturing an organisational climate in which peer-to-peer relationships can flourish.

Looks like my calendar needs a new tag line.

The Persistence of Memory

I recently completed reading “Moonwalking with Einstein” by Joshua Foer, an entertaining and thought provoking book that mixes a history of memory with an adventure story. Foer sets out to discover if he can improve his poor memory, and embarks on a journey that leads him to compete in the 2006 US Memory Championship. Along the way he discusses the “art and science” of remembering.

And whilst I don’t entirely agree with his assertion that if you “strip away the emotions, the philosophising, the neuroses and the dreams” then our brains “are fundamentally prediction and planning machines”, it represents a good description of an organisation’s “brain” , tasked with predicting, planning and deciding what and how to do or not do business.

And a reliable “organisational memory” is vital to avoid continually repeating the same mistakes and relearning “know how”. Remembering enables past practices and solutions to be used in new situations for competitive advantage and reduces the dependency of an organisation on individual “stars”.

Organisational memory is a generic concept that has been around for 20 years or so. Walsh and Ungson defined it in 1991 as “stored information from an organisation’s history that can be brought to bear on present decisions”.  It is the ability of an organisation to acquire, retain, and retrieve knowledge and, crucially, to be able to reflect on and re-contextualise that knowledge to meet current challenges. Retention of tacit knowledge or “know how”  -  the intuitive, hard to define knowledge that is acquired through experience over time – is crucial. “Know how” is a most valuable “in firm” source of competitive advantage as it provides experiential advantage over new rivals. If it can be retained and retrieved.

Unfortunately an organisation’s memory can be as bad as an individual’s, particularly for “know how” as this is commonly stored in individuals heads (collectively the firm’s transactive memory) rather than in knowledge management systems. Every time an individual leaves “know how” melts away from the organisation’s memory like the camembert of time in Dali’s painting.

Are there equivalent techniques to those Joshua Foer uses that can be used to improve an organisation’s memory? Certainly and too many for a single blog – so more on this topic in future. For now, I think knowledge retention is an interesting lens through which to view talent management practice. And a refocussing on the corporate rather than the individual, on “grow your own” rather than “buy and bribe”, and on experiential learning and reflection may be timely.

I’d be interested to hear any thoughts on the implications of social networking and learning on tacit knowledge retention and welcome any suggestions for further reading (Arnold Kransdorff currently has my attention).

Time for a new approach?

Ever notice how sometimes things aren’t working out as expected?   For example, maybe you find yourself doing the same repetitive task over and over again or you realize that your just not finding time to do something that is quite critical (both examples completely random, and not at all autobiographical! ).

It’s at this time you should be taking a step back, to breathe and think.

Maybe it’s time for a new approach?

As Seth said

Our normal approach is useless here

Perhaps this can be our new rallying cry.

If it’s a new problem, perhaps it demands a new approach. If it’s an old problem, it certainly does.

When you find yourself too busy to work out a better way to do something, you should see that as a warning sign that you need a new plan.

I have first hand experience to know, that the sooner you recognize the signs about when to apply more muscle to a problem and when to work out a whole new approach — the better you will scale, in your job and in your life.

Not all problems need a new approach — but the important ones often do.

Keep looking for ways to make it better — that is the secret.