Editor’s Choices for Week Ending Aug 3, 2012

Article of the Week
Best Practices For Developing A Dream Team (Fast Company)
Big Idea: In their 30 years of studying leadership, coauthors James Kouzes and Barry Posner have discovered the practices common to the best leaders. This article discusses a few from the fifth edition of their “Leadership Challenge” to help you put together your own bench of superstars.

Editor’s Choice Articles
Drucker’s Rule (Strategy+Business)
Big Idea: Left to our own devices, we listen last or not at all. Especially with our own employees. In this excerpt, Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind explain how leaders can counteract this tendency by creating structured, formal processes for listening. Of course, listening alone is not enough; it is understanding that really creates trust and provides insight.

What Every CEO Can Learn From The Olympics’ Wacky Opening Ceremony (Fast Company)
Big Idea: We need leadership at the top that creates cultures where internal creatives can do their thing, get recognized and succeed. And I’m not just talking about areas where creativity naturally should flourish, like marketing and R&D.; But everywhere. Our resistance to the untried knows no corporate boundaries.

Why Your Company Should Celebrate More (Fast Company)
Big Idea: It’s critical to take time to celebrate the accomplishments–both big and small–within an organization. I know that margin pressures and deadlines don’t make this as simple as we would like, but it is nonetheless imperative. If you have a culture that understands how to celebrate its successes, people will remain motivated, achievements will be valued more completely, and deeper relationships will be forged within the group.

Hiring & Recruiting: Forget Interviews. Hire Anyone (Inc.)
Big Idea: Mountains of research shows that interviewing job candidates doesn’t tell you much about how they’ll perform. Depending on whose research you believe, 45% to 75% of new hires don’t deliver what employers originally wanted. Assessing performance through exercises doesn’t tell you anything better.

6 Tricks for Better Performance Reviews (Inc.)
Big Idea:  No one likes those regular performance reviews. Try these simple strategies for getting the most out of the annual sit-down.

The Far Reach of Supportive Senior Managers (Strategy+Business)
Big Idea: Supportive leaders at various levels of a company have independent and significant effects on their employees’ motivation and their desire to stay at the firm. A helpful attitude from top-level management, however, has more influence on employee morale, suggesting that workers who are in conflict with their immediate bosses still feel they can work out their problems if the overarching culture is supportive.

The rise of the chief culture officer (Fortune)
Big Idea: Many companies, Oehler says, are seeing that “macroeconomic pressures have created a dysfunctional culture, one that is not supporting business performance moving forward,” and now, they are trying to figure out how keep their culture from spinning out of control. One way to do this is to bring someone into the C-Suite whose job it is to keep an eye on culture.