Unleashing the full capacity of your people
Management “by walking around” topped the business leadership advice list a number of years ago, and still sells books. Credit for the original idea variously is given to an HP manager from the Seventies, or to Abraham Lincoln.
Read a biography of Lincoln and you will see that he indeed did a lot of “walking around” as part of his management style. He visited army camps unannounced. He hung out …
Apples-to-Apples is a popular game in my house, where a person must decide which word submitted by the other players best fits a theme card. The winning entry gets the theme card. Collect enough theme cards and you win the game. Players are allowed to lobby for their submission to win that theme card.
This has a strong echo in corporate decision-making processes. The best decision is not always taken, …
Research confirms that downtime regularly interspersed into our working lives raises our energy and ability to focus. We live in a 24/7 world, so leaders must actively work on shielding their people from work "alerts" during their time off. Engagement rises when employees can disengage at night and on weekends.
As Q1 ends and Spring arrives, it is time to inject energy into your own leadership improvement program. Remember those earnest January commitments? Time to measure your progress and reset your improvement plan to move forward with renewed commitment. We have some ideas for getting that done.
Your achievements are the sum of your habits. What you get done each day is built on the habitual way you approach your job and work relationships. So, holding onto bad habits, largely out of comfort, impedes your own career progress! How to swap those out for great habits? Read on.
Why does culture still upend strategy? Why do companies still struggle to execute their carefully researched and thought-out strategic initiatives, even if they make tons of sense? Employee engagement.
December is a great time to try out new, more engaging leadership habits. People are more relaxed around the office, and open to deeper personal engagement outreach. Get started now on good habits you can use to raise productivity in 2018. We offer three areas on which to focus.
As we do every year, we encourage you to take the spirit of gratitude and appreciation that Thanksgiving fosters back to work with you.
Hold onto that feeling permanently, expressing it each day when you see good work done. As we have written before, showing gratitude in small ways every day makes a big difference in the lives of your co-workers, bosses and subordinates.
To help you “take Thanksgiving …
As the year ends, you must assess your progress in improving leadership habits. How much progress have you made in replacing bad habits with good? Everyone makes some progress, and everyone backslides. How well you dig into causes and motivations (diagnosis!) could make the difference in continued progress. Click through for more!
As a leader, you don’t work in a vacuum. You work in a lively mix of personalities, behaviors and motivations. If you want to sustainably raise productivity through better employee engagement, you must get to know your people in greater depth and work hard to keep them all aligned with your mission. As always, we have some thoughts about how best to do that!