Have you ever asked why it’s so difficult to get things done in business today—despite seemingly endless meetings and emails? Why does it take so long to make decisions—and even then not necessarily the right ones?

Many organizations address these problems by redesigning boxes and lines:...

In our efforts to connect across our organizations, we’re drowning in real-time virtual interaction technology, from Zoom to Slack to Teams, plus group texting, WeChat, WhatsApp etc.

There’s seemingly no excuse to not collaborate. The problem? Interacting is easier than ever, but true, pro...

A recent McKinsey survey found 80 percent of executives were considering or already implementing changes in meeting struct...

We’ve observed three broad categories of collaborative interactions (exhibit):

• Decision making, including complex or uncertain decisions (for example, investment decisions) and cross-cutting routine decisions (such as quarterly business reviews)
• Creativ...

One of the key factors for fast, high-quality decisions is to clarify exactly who makes them. Consider a success story at a renewable-energy company. To foster accountability and transparency, the company developed a 30-minute “role card” conversation for managers to have with th...

We recommend a simple yet comprehensive approach for defining decision rights called DARE:

• Deciders are the only ones with a vote.
• Advisers have input and help shape the decision. They have an outsize voice in setting the co...

Routine working sessions are fairly straightforward. What many organizations struggle with is finding innovative ways to identify and drive toward solutions. How often do you tell your teams what to do versus empowering them to come up with solutions?

While they may solve the imm...

Successful empowerment, counterintuitively, doesn’t mean leaving employees alone. Empowerment requires leaders to give employees both the tools and the right level of guidance and involvement.

Leaders should play what we call the coach role: coaches don’t tell people what...

All organizations should do more to improve the coaching skills of managers and help them to create the space and time to coach teams, as opposed to filling out reports, presenting in meetings, and other activities that take time away from driving impact through the work of their...

As you start this journey, be sure to take a close look at psychological safety.

If employees don’t feel psychologically safe, it will be nearly impossible for leaders and managers to break through disempowering behaviors like constant escalation, hiding problems or risks, and being a...

An increasing number of organizations have begun to realize the urgency of driving ruthless meeting efficiency and of questioning whether meetings are truly required at all to share information.

Live interactions can be useful for information sharing, particularly when th...

Many companies are moving to shorter meetings (15 to 30 minutes) rather than the standard default of one-hour meetings in an effort to drive focus and productivity.

Meetings cannot go beyond 30 minutes. Meetings for one-way information sharing must be cancelled in favour o...