Donald Trump’s unexpected win in the U.S. presidential election is unleashing an inevitable maelstrom of analysis: Why and how did it happen? As with the Brexit vote, almost all pollsters and pundits failed to foresee this result. But now that we have a clear outcome, it’s time to move forward and assess the implications for business and society.

So what are those implications, exactly?

The U.S. presidential election did not unfold the way so many predicted it would. We now know some of the reasons why — polling failed — but watching the real-time results on Tuesday night wasn’t just surprising, it was confusing. Predictions swung back and forth, and it was hard to process the information that was coming in. So not only did the data seem wrong, the way we were presenting that data seemed wrong too.

The next day I asked my colleague Scott Berinato, our data visualization expert, if he would help explain this uncertainty — how we dealt with it, why it was so hard to grasp, and what’s so challenging about visualizing it.

Keep Reading

Most leadership advice is based on anecdotal observation and basic common sense. Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Kathryn Shaw tried a different tack: data-driven analysis.

Through research done in collaboration with a very large, undisclosed technology-based company that has a penchant for collecting data, Shaw found that employees who work under good bosses were more productive. “There are bad bosses out there,” she says, “but what’s not talked about as much is that there are also good bosses.”

Keep Reading

Forbes Coaches Council

A recent Deloitte study found that 56 percent of executives believe their companies are not ready to meet today’s leadership needs. Many companies are responding, last year spending $31 billion on leadership development programs, and since 2015 alone spending on such programs has increased by 10 percent.

Jesse Demmel, vice president of platform engineering at Under Armour, rewrites an old adage: “Some leaders are born. Many are made.

Keep Reading

Marcel Schwantes, Inc.

I've written often on the power of transparency — the backbone of trust — that brings teams together to produce great work. Trust simply cannot happen without it.

And if you're in a leadership role, I caution you — OK, I ask you nicely, you will thank me later — please do your absolute best to know the status and condition of employees under your care.

This is where the ability to be transparent does its best work and gives you competitive advantage.

Keep Reading

Alan E. Nelson, Chicago Business Journal

A powerless leader is an oxymoron because a person without power can’t lead and therefore isn’t truly a leader.

Leaders must deal in power. Those who deny it are either ignorant or lying. Technically, in organizational behavior terms, power is the potential to influence, and influence is the activation of power.

While we think of how leaders do power plays and influence others toward specific goals, we also need to understand how power plays leaders — whether they be this year’s Presidential candidates or the ambitious new high-potential hired by your company.

Keep Reading

When it comes to organizational change, failure continues to be more common than success. In a survey of nearly 3,000 executives about the success of their enterprise transformation efforts, McKinsey discovered the failure rate to be higher than 60 percent, while Harvard Business Review conducted a study that suggested more than 70 percent of transformation efforts fail.

The pattern is clear, and diligent leaders often devote countless resources to planning out the perfect change management initiative. To raise the odds of success, however, my experience suggests the place that leaders need to begin their transformation efforts is not their organizations: It’s themselves.

If you’ve ever been interrupted at work and found it difficult to concentrate afterward, you’ve experienced the effects of organizational friction. But what you might not have considered is how these small experiences of friction compound to slow down an organization’s operations: meetings that are a bit longer than they need to be, decision-making processes that grind along a little too slowly and employees who have a bit less energy to tackle important problems each day.

Keep Reading

There are organizations that are great at what they do, that are relentless at it. But it turns out there are very few that are great and relentless at people development. When it comes to preparing organizations for a complex, high-speed future, many people who work in those organizations, or in management science, talk about the imperative for “continuous improvement” in operations. But it is one thing to be relentless about continuously improving the processes by which work gets done; it is quite another — and every bit as necessary — to be relentless about continuously improving the people who do the work.

Keep Reading