TOP INSIGHT
Good stress, bad stress and how to tell the difference
People are more productive, learn more and perform better when there’s inner tension, according to Tomas Chamorro Premuzic, psychology professor and ManpowerGroup chief talent scientist, and they can only build up resilience by experiencing some form of hardship.
In this article he gives his opinion on how managers spot that stress levels may have gone too far.
How wellbeing improves performance
In this interview, Annastiina Hintsa, CEO of Hintsa Performance, discusses the link between employee wellbeing and high performance. She argues that it is integral to sustainable performance and provides practical insights to help leaders prioritise the wellbeing of their teams.
Eight steps to setting up successful agile teams
Agile teams work differently from chain-of-command bureaucracies. They are optimally suited for innovation - capable of profitably applying creativity to improve customer solutions, business processes, and technology. Here is how it works: to tackle an identified opportunity, the organisation forms and empowers a small (typically three to nine people), multidisciplinary team with the skills necessary to complete its tasks. The team manages itself and is strictly accountable for every aspect of its work.
Senior leaders tell team members where to innovate but not how. Confronted with a large, complex problem, the team breaks it into modules and develops solutions to each component through rapid prototyping and tight customer feedback loops. Members hold themselves accountable for outcomes (such as growth, profitability, and customer loyalty), not just outputs (such as lines of code or number of new products). This structure reduces layers of control and approval, speeds up work and increases motivation.
