ORG Blog

The Secret Science Behind Great Teams

From The Chicago Bulls to The Beatles, there’s one special thing that great teams have in common – chemistry. The way different personalities come together in the right way at the right time is where the magic of teamwork happens.

Topics: Collaboration Leadership Sustainable Change Employee Engagement

Beyond Hope: A Strategy to Transform Your Organization

Day in, day out. You hope things will get better. Hope the seemingly constant tide of issues will finally subside. Hope your team will learn to work together. Hope the people problems will stop sabotaging productivity. Hope to actually have time to do what you are best at, the work you love to do.”

Topics: Sustainable Change

Five Surefire Ways to Create Distrust with Employee Surveys

While much can be learned by conducting employee surveys, many corporations have learned the hard way that poor surveying technique can do more harm than good. In fact, generally, when executives are opposed to surveying, their opposition is based on poor experiences with surveying in the past.

Topics: Conflict Resolution Leadership Sustainable Change

Why Employee Engagement Efforts Sometimes Fail and What You Can do About It! - Part 1

In today’s major corporations, you can hear terms such as “employee involvement,” “employee engagement,” and “high-performance teams” echoing through the hallways. Nearly every big company has some sort of engagement effort underway. This is in sharp contrast to 30 years ago, when I began my career. Back then, only a couple dozen prominent companies were experimenting in what was most often referred to as “participative management” or “socio-technical systems.”

Topics: Collaboration Sustainable Change

Don't Let Honest Mistakes Kill Good Labor Management Relationships

AVIODING THE DEATH OF A 1,000 "OOPS" 

Two stories out of a thousand…

Topics: Collaboration Labor Management Leadership Sustainable Change

Civil Rights Movement Reveals Key to Sustainable Change

Recently, I had the pleasure of being a guest lecturer at the New York University Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service for a graduate study course on Labor Management Cooperation. My host was Arthur Matthews, an accomplished mediator, arbitrator and adjunct professor at NYU, Cornell and the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas. A colleague of Howard’s, Kathy Drew-King also served as a guest lecturer for the course. Kathy is a Regional Attorney for the NLRB office serving the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island in the City of New York, and Nassau and Suffolk Counties.

Topics: Collaboration Labor Management Leadership Sustainable Change

4 Proven Ways to Prepare for and Overcome First Mistakes

It is not the “first mistake” that creates problems, and even hazards. It’s all the other mistakes that can follow. Allow me to explain.

Topics: Leadership Sustainable Change

Involving Union Leaders in the Budget Cycle Reaps Bottom-line and Relational Impact

Of all the management rights, budgetary responsibility is perhaps the one most tightly held. At the same time, some of the loudest laments we hear from management leaders are that employees do not understand the business, or the budgetary realities and financial constraints under which they must operate. Therein lies the root of a vicious cycle: in the spirit of protecting a coveted management right, leaders may inadvertently perpetuate an informational vacuum, which gets filled with misinformation, rumor and hearsay.

Topics: Collaboration Labor Management Leadership Sustainable Change

Voices, Votes, and External Influence: Labor Management History Repeats Itself

November 22, 2014 will be the 21st anniversary of the end of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) strike at American Airlines. This is significant to me for several reasons– one is because I was there, in the middle, and I remember it like it was yesterday. The second is because recent history reminds me of the power of external influences on the labor- management process in the United States.

Topics: Collaboration Conflict Resolution Labor Management Leadership Overland Resource Group Sustainable Change

Breakthrough Thinking + Collaboration = Something Special In Perth

Once in a while a story comes along that cuts through the chatter, clutter and cynicism that seem to permeate our collective conversation. These are the stories that keep alive a picture of what we can be when we're at our best together.

Topics: Breakthrough Collaboration Labor Management Sustainable Change