This article in strategy+business makes some excellent points on leadership. Being a leader means putting yourself out there; even if you might be wrong. You need to be confident enough to take a stand, but flexible enough to listen to other points of view that might differ from yours. You need to be consistent in how you show up, as this article points out. Leaders who are...
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Does your leadership style create leaders or followers? In the old ‘command and control’ days, creating followers was the way you succeeded. However, for a truly successful company, it’s more important to create leaders than followers. This YouTube video from L. David Marquet entitled “What is Leadership?” gives us a perspective on how to create leaders and thus a more effective organization. Now I ask...
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If employee engagement is such an issue within American corporations, why are so few making any headway in correcting the problem? A number of years ago, the CEO of a very large company had heard that employees of his company were not happy, so he commissioned an employee survey which then confirmed those rumors. His reaction to the survey results? ‘Well, if they don’t like...
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Attracting top talent is difficult enough, but retaining them can be even more difficult. And given the high cost of hiring and training new employees, it seems to me you might want to consider all the ways you can retain high performers. In this article from strategy + business magazine, they confirm that, yes, it really IS all about them. Employees want to feel engaged...
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Here is a great article by my long-time friend, Mark Sheffert of Manchester Companies: “Disengaged Employees: The New Normal – Workers who don’t care will eat up your profits”. In it Mark discusses some of the findings of Gallup’s “State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for U.S. Business Leaders.” So why are employees so disengaged? Well, I have some thoughts around that: For too many years, they have...
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It is amazing to me that the average new hire turnover rate is 25%. Man, that’s a lot of money down the drain, not to mention all the effort that went into the process to hire who you thought was the right person. INC Magazine’s article “Help new employees succeed from day one” offers some great tips for onboarding. Finding the right talent is one thing,...
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I was talking to a neighbor recently who told me how much she hates her job. She said what she mainly hates about it is her co-workers; no one talks to each other. They either ignore her completely or they’re nasty or some of them are just plain mean. This is a retail environment. Do you suspect how the employees treat their customers is any different than how they...
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Here is a great and apt article from Forbes – “30 Outdated Leadership Practices Holding Your Company Back“. It shows some ideas to ponder when thinking about change management and how you might bring your company into this century with your leadership.
Man, how many of us have had a boss we were pretty sure was a “psycho”? Here’s an article from CNBC by Allison Linn outlining some interesting research on the topic. Why DO companies promote these types of individuals? I’ve been fortunate to have some great bosses in my life – the best two just happened to be women. They were fair, very supportive, always had my...
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There recently was a great article from strategy + business entitled “Are You Leading Like It’s 1980“? It talks about changing our attitude and behavior toward performance reviews to become forward-looking and productive conversations vs. backward-looking narrow perspectives that equate to ‘what have you done for me lately’? There has been only one company I worked for where I actually looked forward to my performance appraisals. It was...
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