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 >
Culture
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 >
Reversing Corporate Conflict Avoidance in 2 Steps
Executives and leaders have a responsibility to create an environment where all of their employees work together toward a common goal. This, when done right, will enable the company to bring in enough revenue to keep everyone employed and to grow the business. But after working with several hundred senior executives and business owners, I’ve Read More >
Why Empowering Employees is an Important Facet of Leadership
For decades, in Corporate America, employees were considered to be subordinate to management and there was rarely any push-back with regard to who led and who followed. Thankfully, times have changed. Managers have, for the most part, now discovered how much more successful a business can be when they encourage and cultivate the creativity, perceptions, Read More >
Building Top Teams: What it Takes
If you want to build a top team, forget team building ropes courses or wilderness adventures. These activities do bring people together; they are usually fun and participants feel great afterward. But once people get back into the workplace and encounter real problems to solve, the carry-over learning fades quickly. Building effective teams is an Read More >
Building High-Performance Executive Teams
In a previous executive briefing titled Building Top Teams: What it Takes, I outlined the five basic conditions executives need to create and provide for ensuring the success of teams: Establish a clear and compelling direction Create an appropriate structure Select the right people Support the top team Provide development While those five conditions are Read More >
5 Ways to Create a Necessary Sense of Urgency
They may sound similar, but there’s a big difference between urgency and emergency. Emergency is an after-the-fact response to an action or consequence, while urgency is a proactive state of performance that CEOs often need to create. Urgency is often needed in times of change, which may arise for various reasons. Most often, change is Read More >
Building Creativity into Your Organization
Whether in startups or established companies, leaders and executives are expected to be pioneers of new ideas and solutions. But when you’re just one person in a larger team or massive company, being the sole source of new ideas can prove to be exhausting–and not very fruitful. To generate better ideas, improve employees’ problem solving Read More >
How to Create a Collaborative Approach at Work
As an executive, it’s your job to make sure that the team or your employees meet deadlines, provide deliverables, and continue to progress on your company’s goals. To keep things running smoothly, it may seem like you need to know exactly what’s going on all the time in every department. But micromanagement and overbearing leadership Read More >
Dealing with Resistant Personalities
All organizations have people who are opposed to changes in the status quo. These people have either helped create or worked within a structure for years, and it has become their comfort zone. Individuals like this will likely guard their zone fiercely and are opposed to policy change, feeling it could affect their job security. Read More >