Management - Leadership

What do ROWE and incentives have in common? More than a little. At least that’s the hypothesis I’m floating out here.

I’ve recently been writing about business leadership and strategy, and I began thinking about something one of my mentors taught me about being an executive.

Something snapped the other day when I read the TLNT post on HR’s “first official standard” on cost-per-hire – after two years of work by a 42-member committee.

They didn’t do anything special for your birthday. They didn’t remember your anniversary. And after you invested so much time, they didn’t take your relationship to the next level. Check, please!

One hundred fifty years of research proves that shorter work hours actually raise productivity and profits -- and overtime destroys them. So why do we still do this?

Why is it that between 25 and 50 per cent of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work?

Bob Sutton, professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University and author of Good Boss, Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule (among others), is one of my go-to bloggers.

Never is the generation gap more exposed than during conflict. It’s during these turbulent times when managers lose their cool with younger employees and things often end worse than they need to.

The quest for efficiency and productivity improvement that permeates the corporate world trickles down from entire organizations, to teams, to projects and, finally, to individuals.

I don’t usually read things that jump out and grab me, but an article in Sunday’s New York Times did, because it had probably the best definition of employee engagement that you’ll ever see, anywhere.

If you are like most managers, you don’t relish the thought of giving negative feedback.

Research shows that maintaining a roll call of projects you need to get done is a system that's fatally flawed...

One federal employee asks for advice about standing up to a manager who frequently crosses the line.

On a daily basis, I track several dozen news and online sources for employee recognition, engagement, motivation and the like. I’ve read more dry and boring reports and stories than I care to admit.

Charles investigates why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. He takes us to laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.

“I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.” That is the defining statement from Greg Smith, the …...

To help rid the earth of this poisonous gobbledygook, we crafted a bracket, similar to the NCAA college basketball tournament, featuring 32 abominable expressions.

As a mgr never equate teaching with learning. You don't know what you have taught until you see what has been learned.

Editor’s Note: This is Part 3 of a series (you can find Part 1 and Part 2 here) on why the annual performance review process needs to go away and what should be done instead.  I’ve written about why annual …...

As the economy slowly improves, companies everywhere are starting to worry a lot more about an issue that had just about been forgotten during the recession and its aftermath: employee retention.

Article after article tells us that we should halt our use of incentives because people aren’t motivated by money. Or because they are motivated by money, but to do the wrong things.

Through his example, Starfleet's finest Captain has something to teach us about leadership. Here are five lessons to take on your own voyages.