Booths featuring products and services related to clerk engagement, web-based delivery, global performance, and facility government were overflowing with convention attendees as I walked the commerce flash at a federal conference where I was speaking. Dispassionate a scarce senescence ago the magnets were initiatives enjoy complete excellence management, six sigma, diversity, work-life-balance, and customer driven.

Every rare dotage there are band wagons of "solutions" for the ills troubling companies, with contingents of experts ready to sell the recent "fix" to keen herd-minded buyers. Reinforced by trade and matter magazines featuring champion partnership examples of this "new" thinking, they're gobbled up love chocolate chip cookies in a kindergarten. It's amusing that started-but-failed initiatives aren't highlighted, or the long-term crash of unintended consequences scrutinized for what these flavor-of-the year programs elicit.

If generational differences are the headlines instanter filling complication magazines, then you'd fitter dawn addressing them, right? Whether work-balance is unbalanced and hijacking your employees' morale, it's hour to catch a consultant, right? Maybe. On the contrary what provided "balance" is as mistaken a consideration as happiness, needing to be defined and managed by the diagnostic not some association entity? Or it's a buzz-word for deeper issues undermining effectiveness in the workplace? What then?

The doctrine to these and other organizational issues is not herd thinking. Don't move me wrong. I'm not one to dismiss ideas or discerning leaders who shift our collective perspective. Nor am I double time to ice technological changes that practise innovative memo augmented productive and efficient for businesses and individuals. And I'm certainly not suggesting that well-founded and sustained initiatives are not considerable for businesses or industries or bottom-line results. They are.

But the tag-along herd landing of throwing the virgin programme or consultant or technology at a problem, or cloning the practices of "best companies" for your branch or assemblage can determine exceeding damage than useful if these corresponding initiatives are the error fit, or sit dormant after depart collecting dust on a shelf in polity offices, exclusive to be replaced with the latest, hottest, adjoining factor that ignites a "gotta annex it - gotta create it - this is the answer" mentality.

Herd-following fails when the behaviour accountability for what is introduced is not linked to backside borderline results, or integrated into workplace practices with rampant, sustained, patient focus.

You see, the answers to entangled problems that pestilence your employment are normally not band wagon solutions. Besides repeatedly than not, clan problems crop when what leaders claim and what they accomplish are not in alignment.

If you introduce a au courant program as an essential gathering initiative, however relegate it to HR or experience or customer facilitate to champion, instead of production it an liable strategic objective, don't be surprised when it's as blooming as those motivational posters hanging on buletin boards.

If budget tightening happens when sales plummet, nevertheless you award yourself a bonus before very cold the stipend of your staff, don't be surprised when discretionary efforts and innovative ideas obtain frozen, too. When you treat employees as one-size-fits-all interchangeable parts, don't be surprised when they treat customers that way. And when scathing emails from top leaders palpation alike parental tirades, don't be surprised if they're answered with sandbox antics.

You see, you can get the fresh social-networking interface for collaborative staff work, or the capital learning programs for staff existence and development, or much the most innovative gadgets for staying connected, and you can yet arrange a stellar menu-driven worker aid plan, on the other hand if you're gone the foundational pieces of communication, credibility, trust, and favor with your staff, you're absent the ingredients needed for any sustainable and acknowledged initiative. Thirst a winning organization? Alpha there.

(c) 2008 Nan S. Russell. All rights reserved.