What Is a Process Flow Chart? Key Terms Process Flow Chart A visual diagram that maps the sequence of steps, decisions, and flows within a process, using standardised symbols to represent activities, decision points, inputs, and outputs. Also known as a process map or flowchart, it makes an invisible process visible — enabling teams to…
Setting SMART Goals: The Complete Manager’s Guide to Goal Setting
What Are SMART Goals? Key Terms SMART Goals A goal-setting framework — first introduced by George T. Doran in a 1981 Management Review article — that defines effective goals as those which are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. The framework provides managers and teams with a consistent standard for translating strategy into actionable, accountable…
Dealing With Difficult Employees: A Manager’s Practical Framework
What Causes Difficult Employee Behaviour? Key Terms Difficult Employee Behaviour Actions or patterns by an employee that persistently obstruct team performance, create conflict, or violate expected conduct standards — including disruptive communication, resistance to direction, negativity, poor performance, or interpersonal aggression. Critically, most difficult behaviour has an underlying cause that, when properly diagnosed, significantly changes…
What Is Corporate Culture? Definition, Types, and How to Change It
What Is Corporate Culture? Key Terms Corporate Culture The shared values, beliefs, behaviours, norms, and assumptions that characterise an organisation and shape how its members interact, make decisions, and get work done. Culture is “the way we do things around here” — often unwritten, largely invisible, and powerfully determinative of organisational performance. It operates below…
McKinsey 7S Model: A Complete Guide to Organisational Alignment
What Is the McKinsey 7S Model? Key Terms McKinsey 7S Model An organisational effectiveness framework developed by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman at McKinsey & Company in the 1980s (and further elaborated in their book In Search of Excellence, 1982). The model proposes that seven interdependent elements must be aligned for an organisation to operate…
Change Management Models: Lewin, EASIER, Kotter and When to Use Each
What Are Change Management Models? Key Terms Change Management Models Structured frameworks that guide organisations through planned transitions — helping leaders and teams navigate the psychological, cultural, and operational dimensions of change in a sequenced, evidence-based way. They exist because organisational change has a well-documented failure rate: McKinsey research finds that 70% of transformation initiatives…
Change Management Issues: Why Change Fails and How to Prevent It
What Are Change Management Issues? Key Terms Change Management Issues The people, cultural, and process barriers that prevent planned organisational change from achieving its intended outcomes. Research consistently finds that approximately 70% of change initiatives fail — and that the primary causes are almost never technical or strategic, but human: inadequate leadership, insufficient communication, unmanaged…
The Change Curve – A Complete Manager’s Guide
What Is the Change Curve? Key Terms The Change Curve A psychological model — originally developed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969 to describe how terminally ill patients process grief — that has been widely adopted in organisational change management to predict and understand the emotional stages employees go through when faced with significant change….
ADKAR Change Management Model: A Complete Guide to Individual Change
What Is the ADKAR Model? Key Terms ADKAR A goal-oriented change management model developed by Jeff Hiatt of Prosci Research (1998) that focuses on enabling and tracking individual change adoption. The acronym stands for: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement. ADKAR is distinctive in that it treats organisational change as the aggregate of many individual transitions…
Kotter’s 8 Step Process: The Essential Framework for Organisational Change
What Is Kotter’s 8-Step Process? Key Terms Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model A sequential change management framework developed by Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter, published in Leading Change (1996), based on analysis of over 100 major transformation initiatives. The model identifies eight stages that must be executed in sequence for large-scale organisational change to succeed,…