Do You Agree? Several reasonably consistent comments, in one form or another, are being made by business leaders. One is, “My employees treat our customers the way we treat our employees.” Another is, “Customers first is wrong. It’s employees first. Then the employees will take good care of our customers.” Also, of course, there’s the ancient mantra still spoken today, …
Engagement: There’s lots of talk about employee engagement these days. And there’s good reason for us to be discussing this topic. Gallup tells us that about 70% of our employees are disengaged. It’s been the same number, plus or minus a percent or two, since they have been doing the employee survey. Apparently, few find that they are engaged in …
According to an Adelaide newspaper in Australia: “A championship team will always beat a team of champions.” A young entrepreneur I know said, “I would much rather play on a championship team than on a team of champions.” His sport in college was basketball. He pointed out that you can easily tell the championship team if you watch the college …
According to Gallup The numbers rarely change. In the U.S., the annual Gallup survey shows that about 70% of our employees are NOT engaged. Meaning, they are putting in no extra effort to move the company forward. Employee engagement is the engine of productivity. Job #1 The CEO, Founder, Owner of a company has one main job and that is …
Bill Taylor: A while back, I had the pleasure of hearing Bill Taylor of FastCompany Magazine speak and moderate a leadership summit. Bill suggests that we each should have a sentence—that one sentence that describes your reason to exist. I have always thought of that as my vision or purpose or “BHAG” (big hairy audacious goal) or north star, or …
I’ll be frank, I don’t understand the question that comes up so frequently in my circles — “How do we manage the Millennials?” To me, it seems really straightforward. Somehow, people have confused themselves. You manage projects, you lead people. Try leading Millennials instead of managing them. Managing vs Leading There are several ways of distinguishing between leading and managing. The …
Maxwell: Back in 2000, John Maxwell authored a book entitled Developing the Leader Within You. In that book, he posited that there are five levels of leadership. He named those levels Position, Permission, Production, People Development, and Pinnacle. In this post, I discuss the fourth of the five and we will explore the last level in our final post of …
Real World: Fresh out of engineering school and excited to begin my new job, I enthusiastically started work on test equipment design for a digital fuel-control. One of the more memorable experiences was working with the technician assigned to our team. He was (is?) a true craftsman. He built the circuit-boards we designed in a neat, logical, and efficient manner. …
Corner Office Is there a corner office? Who’s in it? Someone with gray hair and lots of leadership miles or a young person in a hoodie and ripped genes (and ripped abs!)? I’m finding, much to my delight, that the chief executives, company founders, and c-suite leaders I work with are increasingly of the Millennial (or so-called “Y”) generation. I …
Almost all the leadership topics of the day wind up talking about “clarity” at one point or another. Why is that? I noticed this phenomenon while reading such diverse topics as “employee engagement,” “vision and purpose statements,” “execution culture,” “developing leaders,” “executive coaching” and “what motivates employees.” The common thread I noticed was clarity. The online dictionary defines clarity as: …