Blog

It’s Not Easy Being Videoed

Cate Lawrence - Apr 15, 2013 - No Comments

Have you been in that video conference call where you can see that people are going for the expressionless look? Kind of reminds me of that scene in the movie “Speed,” where our hero, Keanu Reeves, admonishes the passengers on the bus to make only small movements so that the

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Behave Your Way IN to Effective Outsourcing

Cate Lawrence - Apr 08, 2013 - No Comments

Outsourcing arrangements with well-managed relationships are more likely to be successful. Relationship management can create a 20-40% difference in service quality, cost, and other performance factors. Globally, organizations investing most in developing successful relationships consistently perform better than competitors in the same sector. Transparency and trust are not just “nice-to-have”

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Your Email Got There, but Did Your Message?

Cate Lawrence - Mar 12, 2013 - No Comments

Why do operations professionals need to enhance collaboration skills within supply chains? Because transactions will continue to become increasingly complex. We have always dealt with supply and demand challenges, but the pace of innovation creates more liability for obsolescence, and as the drive to enhance the customer experience becomes greater,

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Collaborating with a Service-Dominant Logic Platform

Cate Lawrence - Feb 14, 2013 - No Comments

Operations management and marketing professionals often take different views of how to leverage the power of the customer. The traditional view of producing goods or services naturally causes different business units to respond to their own performance incentives. Taking a different approach that reflects I at I some and view

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Soft Skills for Hard Targets

Cate Lawrence - Feb 05, 2013 - No Comments

We hear about “soft skills” often, which basically describe how we play well, or do not play well, with others. So we are talking about listening, speaking, negotiating, collaborating, trust, influence, customer experience, team development, etc. Some use a framework, such as Emotional Intelligence Quotient, to provide something of a

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What Can You Do Right Now?

Cate Lawrence - Jan 30, 2013 - No Comments

“Lean tools can be taught to anybody. We know now that the soft skills are the critical part of this whole process.” This is according to an operations manager at Herman Miller, a leading furniture manufacturer. What can you do right now that will improve your soft skill set and

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I Don’t Think I Ever Saw that Email…

Cate Lawrence - Jan 13, 2013 - No Comments

We know that conflict is going to be part of team activity. When we speak of reducing conflict, we are talking about unproductive conflict, the kind of conflict that does not yield a creative solution, but rather hampers progress. Effective communication minimizes misunderstandings. The major problem with distributed teams is

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More about “Swift Trust”

Cate Lawrence - Dec 11, 2012 - No Comments

Having a basic understanding of observable communication style helps remove some uncertainty, and creates some swift trust. We are deliberate and purposeful about many endeavors in our lives because we know that improvement does not simply occur by itself. Anyone who wants to excel at a sport knows that deliberate

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Getting to Know You

Cate Lawrence - Dec 04, 2012 - No Comments

Besides beginning with good team hygiene, what can we do to foster effective communication and productive relationships in virtual teams? We can start by keeping teams as small as possible, or configure large teams into smaller sub-teams. We can extend the deliberate creation of accountability by encouraging team members to

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Finger-Pointing in Cyberspace

Cate Lawrence - Nov 21, 2012 - No Comments

To achieve a high-performing virtual team, several core process elements must be addressed: Creating accountability Effective communication Conflict management Accountability is a major challenge for virtual teams, especially since many virtual team members have responsibilities in addition to participation in a specific virtual team. Lack of visibility can lead to

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