The most common misconception I hear is that introverts aren’t leaders. Are you an introvert? If so, then it’s likely you’ve been plagued by such misconceptions for most of your career. The truth, however, is that some of the biggest and brightest CEOs of our time are or were introverts. Take Bill Gates and Warren Read More >
Selection, Retention & Succession
5 Steps to Retain Your Best Employees
To stay successful, companies cannot focus on constantly recruiting. Even in deep financial stress, your top employees are going to provide the most value to your company, while high turnover rates and subpar recruitment can decrease productivity and profits. Most successful companies know that they need to keep their top employees and executives happy, and Read More >
Dealing with a Prima Donna Employee
Jane Carter is the CEO of a 150-person, 5-year-old technology company that has been growing at a 20% rate each year. About one year ago, they recruited John, a star sales guy, to work for Bob, V.P. of Sales. John is a true rainmaker. He has boosted sales numbers and the whole company knows and Read More >
How to Handle Resistance to Change
In any organization, there are people who are opposed to change in any form. They have worked within a specific structure for years and sometimes have even helped to create that structure. They are either passively or actively opposed to structural or policy change, feeling it may affect their job security or their authority. An Read More >
The Number 1 Reason Executives Fail in New Jobs
Jack Wilson, CEO of American Manufacturing Enterprises, was coming up on his 8-month mark in his new role and it was painfully apparent to everyone that he was not delivering on the Board’s great expectations. They couldn’t understand how someone with a career of progressive successes, starting as a bright up-and-coming MBA and culminating with Read More >
The Science of Employee Motivation
Contrary to popular belief, employee incentives have limited positive effect on performance of employees or executives. According to Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton in their must-read book, Hard Facts, Half-Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, “individual incentives and highly differentiated reward and recognition distributions make more sense when performance can be objectively assessed Read More >
How to Lead Top Performers in a Global Econonmy
In our modern global economy, most businesses rely on well-educated people — or “knowledge workers,” as the late Peter Drucker called them — to develop their products or deliver their services. In these organizations, many executives are finding that traditional forms of leadership don’t work. “Heroic leadership,” as it is called, is the conventional idea Read More >
3 Things We Can Learn from Michael Phelps About Talent Development
How would you like it if all your employees performed their jobs with the same level of quality and commitment as Michael Phelps gives to swimming? Of course you would. He’s participated in 5 Olympics; won a total of 25 medals, including 21 Gold, 2 Silver, and 2 Bronze; and earned the title of world’s Read More >
A 10-Step Action Plan for Managing Millennials
The face of the American workforce is getting younger. Millennials—born in the last quarter of the 20th Century—now comprise more than one-third of working-age people in the U.S.This generation cut their teeth on rapidly-advancing technology, financial prosperity, immediate gratification, and multi-culturalism. Here are the top 10 things you must know about managing Generation Y employees: They Read More >
3 Ways to Effectively Gauge Leadership Performance
“Good leadership is hard to measure on a daily basis, which is why so many default to doing what’s easy to measure instead.” This quote, pulled from the Twitter feed of best selling leadership author and TED Talks speaker, Simon Sinek, gets to the heart of a real issue—when we can’t tell how well we’re Read More >