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Category:management


Program Evaluation: 9 Things to Avoid and What to Do if You Can’t

The best and most appropriate thing to do when asked to conduct an evaluation with insufficient time, budget and/or resources is to simply walk away.   However, this is not always possible – especially for in-house evaluation…

Tapping Your Innovation Potential

“Doing more with less” has once again become the mantra for executive leaders – and now is the time to capitalize on the opportunity to harness your innovation potential. Budgets have been allocated. Meetings are frantic, issues get…

Building a Performance Culture in the Public Service

The theme of the forthcoming PPX Annual Symposium - From a Compliance Mindset to a Performance Culture – gets to the heart of the challenge posed by results-based management.  One of the keynote questions is “… what level of cultural…

Why All Public Service Managers Need to Care About Evaluation

Results-based management in its current iteration has been around for over ten years and has taken firm root in the Public Service modus operandi as evidenced by the new Policy on Evaluation that requires all direct spending to be…

Are You a Lousy Manager?

The HBR Daily Stat recently pointed to a post by Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO at Gallup – What Makes Workplaces Miserable. The basis of the discussion was about the congressional hearings in the U.S. that were investigating the…

Do you praise your employees enough?

Most of us can recall the familiar sound of our mothers’ warnings: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all!” This is great in theory, but as managers and leaders we have to recognize the importance of…

Delta’s Top 10 Posts for 2011

For the past year we’ve been publishing posts fairly consistently (we aim for twice weekly on Tuesdays and Fridays) on the Delta Blog on a range of topics - from change management and leadership to program evaluation and innovation.…

Managing Change: A workbook for personal and organizational change

"Profound and lasting cultural change in an organization cannot happen unless individuals...themselves undergo a personal change”.      - Stephen R. Covey Over the years, we have helped a large number of clients deal with the…

Strategic & Operating Reviews: The Ultimate Leadership Challenge (Part 2)

What Needs to be Done? “Treat regular workers as if they were volunteers.”       Drucker on Leadership Overview While research shows that engaging employees can directly improve performance, experience has shown that it is…

Strategic & Operating Reviews: The Ultimate Leadership Challenge (Part 1)

In an interview report in a recent issue of the Canadian Government Executive magazine, Wayne Wouters, the top public servant in the Canadian federal government, answered a number of questions explaining his take on leadership in the…

Change Ready or Change Fatigue

Your organization has—though painful at first—completed a large-scale change initiative. And now you are starting your next change project, right on the heels of the first one. Taken together, it just might be too much change for…

Everyone Hates Change: 12 Steps to Help Overcome the Fear and Doubt

Everyone knows—and in theory agrees—that change is necessary.  It must and will occur. Implementing change is hard. And making it stick is even harder whether you are following Kotter’s Eight Steps to Changeor David Ulrich’s Seven Key…

Strategic & Operating Reviews: A Checklist to Understand Your Capacity for Change

As the rate of change that our people and our organizations face continues to accelerate, many are undoubtedly in the process of preparing for some form of transformational change. For public servants, most of you are preparing to face…

Change Begins with Listening: 5 Things to Work On

As Geoff Schaadt conveyed so well in his latest blog post Kotter’s 8 Steps to Change: More Relevant Than Ever, in Step Four, Communicate the Change Vision, it is likely that you will under-communicate 10 to 100 times too much. In other…

Strategic & Operating Reviews Part 5: Waiting for Your Numbers

This post is the fifth in our series on Strategic & Operational Reviews (SOR). Part 1 — Strategic & Operating Reviews: We Can’t Agree to Disagree — dealt with the issue that changes are coming to the Public Service, whether or not…

Kotter’s 8 Steps to Change: More Relevant Than Ever

Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.        - John Wooden In 1996, John Kotter published Leading Change, which quickly became the seminal work in the change management space. 15 years later—an eon in the…

Understanding Corporate Myths and Symbols: 7 Questions to Ask Yourself

I’ve talked about corporate climate and culture in past posts, Do You Know the Difference Between Corporate Culture and Climate? and The Smell of the Place. Today I want to look at two major obstacles to changing corporate culture:…

$90k-a-day for Consulting? Depends What You Are Buying.

Tories hire $90,000-a-day consultant to cut spending The above headline appeared in the Globe & Mail on September 20, 2011. Understandably, the reaction by members of parliament and the public has been swift and vocal. Clearly, many…

A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place — Wouldn’t It Be Nice?

Does it seem to take forever to find that document on your server? Do you spend hours in your storage room looking for things? If so, than you are probably wondering if there is a way to reduce time wasted searching and increase your…

Strategic & Operating Reviews Part 4: A Framework for Success

This post is the fourth in our series on Strategic & Operational Reviews (SOR). Part 1 — Strategic & Operational Reviews: We Can’t Agree to Disagree — dealt with the issue that changes are coming to the Public Service, whether or…