Column: Leadership Matters

This column is the first in a series that will offer insights on how to help companies progress from delivering mediocre user experiences, as is all too common, to producing truly great experiences that differentiate their products and services in the marketplace. Doing so requires a radical transformation in the way business executives and UX teams engage in creating user experiences.

This series is not about making incremental improvements to the way UX teams work. It is about taking a different approach and driving radical transformation within organizations. No major changes in history have ever come about by playing it safe. Having said this, all of the ideas that we’ll share in this series have proven effective in one business context or another. Read More

“Organizations…often develop barriers that hinder information sharing and collaboration. … The job of a leader is to spot these barriers and tear them down….”—Morten T. Hansen

Organizations differ in their ability to collaborate within and across teams and business units. A unique combination of organizational, cultural, and interpersonal barriers to collaboration afflicts any organization that is experiencing difficulty collaborating. Therefore, to assess their organization’s ability to collaborate, leaders must first determine what barriers to collaboration exist within their organization. One effective way of doing this is to conduct a survey to identify which of the behaviors that hinder collaboration commonly occur within their organization.

Once leaders understand what dysfunctional behaviors are preventing their people and teams from collaborating effectively, they must tailor solutions to address the specific barriers to collaboration that exist within their organization. They must motivate their people to change the behaviors that are preventing or diminishing the success of collaboration within and across teams and business units.

In this column, I’ll describe some common organizational, cultural, and interpersonal barriers to collaboration and provide solutions for overcoming them. To create a culture of collaboration, an organization must overcome these barriers. Read More

Is your company failing to innovate and, consequently, finding itself the target of disruptive innovation? Is the ability to deliver stellar experience outcomes eluding your enterprise? Are you having a hard time attracting and retaining the best employees?

In today’s rapidly shifting business environment, many large enterprises are struggling with all three of these challenges. The reason: meeting each of these challenges requires a highly engaged workforce and, unfortunately, such workforces are rare.

If, as a leader within a large enterprise, you need to solve one or more of these problems, you should think about how you can humanize your enterprise and make it a place in which people can do their best work. Read More