Should Employee Engagement Even Be a Priority?

I recently read a Blog post entitled “Why Engagement May be the Best Management Voodoo Ever.” As I worked through the article, I also worked my way rapidly through a range of emotions – from curiosity to irritation to anger to defensiveness to understanding and, finally, back to curiosity. The author, Wally Bock, posits that [...]

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A Sure-Fire Way to Stifle Your Employees

In many circles, leadership is seen as stepping up and “getting things done.” Which, by the way, can be true, but in many circumstances is not such a good idea, because stepping in and doing the job for someone is a quick way to stifle learning and creativity.
Effective leaders learn when to allow their people [...]

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“Great Expectations” are Critical to Performance

Great Expectations. I’m certainly not much for the book. But, then again, I’m no English major. No one will confuse me with my Ph.D.-to-be daughter, the English Major Extraordinaire (I can’t even read her papers – way over my head.) My memory of Great Expectations was suffering through it in high school English [...]

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“Grit”: An Important Hiring Predictor

As a manager, I’m sure you could make a list of traits – in addition to applicable job skills – that any employee must possess in some quantity to be successful: things like intelligence, responsibility, initiative, attention to detail, ability to learn – you get the idea.
But what about “grit?” Is it important to [...]

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Overcoming Resistance to Workplace Change

Broad-based competition, a severe economic slowdown, and many other factors have combined to stagger the coffee juggernaut known as Starbucks. Sales are down; profits are down; and analysts, in general, have not been kind to the former Wall Street wunderkind.
So, it was with more than a passing interest that I read a WSJ article entitled [...]

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Who’s Better: Men or Women?

Who makes a better manager – a man or a woman?
I suspect that in some quarters just asking that question is potentially career threatening! Can you imagine someone actually suggesting – in today’s culture and political environment – that a man might make a better manager because of his gender?
In a recent NY Times article [...]

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Efficient, or Effective?

As a general rule, managers are promoted to their positions because they know how to get thing done – they learn quickly, overcome obstacles, complete projects on time, and often do all of this with little supervision or oversight. So, when it’s time to find a new manager, who better for the job than someone [...]

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A Universal Truth

The foundation of 1-on-1 Management™ is that critical employee development tasks like establishing expectations, creating career goals, and performance recognition (among many other things) are all done best one-on-one. I read an article this week by Carol Kinsey Goman, an executive coach and author who made this interesting observation:
“In this fast-paced, techno-charged era of [...]

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Factors That Create Poor Decisions

One of the more important tasks that managers face is making decisions – short-term, long-term, reactive, strategic, technical, critical or mundane – they come in all shapes and sizes. Unfortunately, according to research data, it appears that many employees tend to have a less than stellar opinion of the soundness of the decisions made by [...]

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5 Areas of Practical Leadership

The notion of leadership has been examined from just about every perspective imaginable. Take a run through the business section of your favorite bookstore and you will find no shortage of leadership ideas.
On the other hand, if you read enough, you will find a number of consistent themes that good leaders share. Several of those [...]

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