You will undoubtedly have used the term emotional intelligence. We usually use it in relation to what we expect from our employees. But what does it mean for you as a CEO or senior executive? Having emotional intelligence doesn’t mean being an emotional person. Rather it involves identifying and harnessing your own emotions, as well as Read More >
Selection, Retention & Succession
Criteria for Selecting Executives
This year has seen significant CEO changes, headlined in the popular media by Jeff Bezos’ stepping down at Amazon. The rationale behind an organization’s choice of a particular C-level executive, and the decisions of the individual themselves, can veer away from best practice. It seems appropriate, therefore, to review the current best thinking on the Read More >
11 Steps For Selecting Top Management Talent
By Carl Robinson, Ph.D., © 2010 Given the expense associated with recruiting executives and the high cost of making poor choices you would think executives would want to do this well. However, I am continually amazed at how frequently senior HR folks will tell me that they have a very difficult time getting their bosses Read More >
10 Tips for Attracting and Keeping Top Talent
Make no mistake: your top-performing talent is aware of their value to the company. They also hold the company to a higher standard because they know they deserve it. Finding this sometimes-elusive talent—and keeping them—requires that senior leaders humanize their companies by investing empathy and communication, and a good deal of trust in the employees 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 >
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 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 >
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 >
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 >
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 >