Management - Leadership

As a long-time manager and executive, I know this to be true: Every manager has a list (at least one in the back of their brain) of the qualities they want most in the people who work for them.

Popular leadership books often use the phrase “born leader” to describe those who possess a natural ability to lead others. What many fail to mention is the number of “natural” leaders who had help along the way.

I’ve done a lot of research and reading lately that really cemented my view that feedback delivered via the formalized annual performance review, is not very useful as a developmental tool. To be useful (i.e.

Are you working harder because you’re scared for your job? Or could you potentially be even more productive if someone simply told you “thanks” for what you do?

Knowledge@Australian School of Business is a new online resource that offers regularly updated business insights, information and research from a variety of sources.

Most people believe that bad weather conditions reduce productivity. In this research the authors predict and find just the opposite.

Ken Blanchard has a favorite question he likes to ask audiences whenever he is teaching about the power of recognition.  He asks, “How many of you receive too much praise at work?”  It’s a bit of a...

Think that a generous, transparent, strategically aligned rewards package will “compensate” for the fact that you have lousy managers in key positions that company leadership is simply unwilling to address?

A new Towers Watson research paper is shedding some light on what attracts employees to an organization (and what keeps them there after they’ve joined.)  The 2012 Global Workforce Study incl...

Why don’t employees do what they are supposed to do?  Former Columbia Graduate School professor and consultant Ferdinand Fournies knows.  Over the course of two decades, Fournies interviewed nearly...

I’m sure you’ve seen it in the news, or at least heard about it – the bullied school bus monitor.

To become an HPO (a High Performance Organization) it is a precondition to hire and retain the right employees.

The ability to motivate employees is one of the greatest skills an entrepreneur can possess. Two years ago, I realized I didn’t have this skill. So I hired a CEO who did.

Thought Tuesday: The best managers break the Golden Rule. Do not treat each person on your team as you would like to be treated -- this assumes that your team shares the same strengths as you. And they don't. Instead, treat each person as he or she would like to be treated. Treat each person as his or her strengths demand.

If you need to give constructive feedback or challenge someone, try prefacing it with authentic self-disclosure. I recently witnessed a great example of this in action.

Poor Management, Poor Leadership, Poor Customer Service -- Strike Three if it's true (or isolated) -- comments suggest it's not completely true.  I'm always cautious when bad stories about management come from bad employees.

"The saying goes: Don't fuck with the person that serves your food," a former Apple Genius tells me over IM.

I have had the good fortune to work for, with, and coach many brilliant people. I have watched many of them struggle with being smarter and faster than everyone around them.Being the smartest one in the room is not easy.

The importance of company culture continues to get more and more coverage in the press, in research studies, and an organizational implementation and resources.

All high performance environments share a serious devotion to results. They’re competitive, stressful workplaces where mediocrity is disdained and failure intolerable.

It is interesting to note that the first strategy listed is to "hire retainable people."  It should be (but often isn't) logically clear that you can't retain top performers unless you hire top performers.  Hiring practices must change -  again performance based hiring is the key.

A chief executive had a dilemma. After working in a fast-growing company as COO, he accepted an offer from venture capitalists to start his own company.

Gift cards and other on-the-spot rewards were a mainstay at California-based Molina Healthcare Inc. for decades, but at the discretion of individual offices around the country. Some managers were religious about the rewards, others less engaged.