The respected consulting firm, Hay Group, has just announced the release of its 6th Annual Best Companies for Leadership study. The top 20 are major corporations with a global presence. Collectively, over the last five years, they have generated shareholder returns that are 36 times better than those from the Standard & Poor 500 companies.
I came across a quote from Oprah Winfrey, interviewed in the Dec. 26/10 issue of Parade : Everybody just wants to be heard…Do your eyes light up when I enter the room? Did you hear me and did what I say mean anything to you? That’s all they’re looking for. That’s what everybody is looking…
The late great expert on mythology, Joseph Campbell, used to tell a tale from the days of King Arthur. One day during a feast, the Holy Grail appears high in the great room but draped in a veil. Then it disappears. The bold Sir Gawain proposes that the knights all go off to find the…
One of the best books written on teams and teamwork is The Wisdom of Teams by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith. They make the distinction between a “team” and what they call a “working group.” The latter is the most common form in workplaces today: a VP with a group of managers, each in charge…
A number of years ago my wife and I attended a workshop on how to facilitate dialogue. The session was led by our colleagues Will Stockton and Marjorie Herdes of Mobius, Inc. They do tremendous work, especially facilitating large group and community dialogue sessions, using a “roadmap” they’ve evolved over the years which they call…
Most of us have had the experience, at least once in our career, of working for a boss who loved his/her role because it was all about: I’m special (after all, they made me the boss) I deserve extra respect (because I’m special, of course) I have real power (try opposing me and you’ll feel…
People with a strong business and entrepreneurial sense are always praising the merits of focusing. They focus on their strategic priorities. They focus on the numbers, benchmarking wherever it makes sense. They focus on the company’s core values, unique selling proposition, and so on. They do so because it is the best way to optimize…
In the hurly burly of meeting deadlines, doing more with less, and achieving performance goals, it is easy to forget to keep up the dialogue with each of your staff about: How they are doing vis-à-vis their performance How they are doing vis-à-vis their well-being Their continuing development and growth
The research and consulting firm, BlessingWhite, is currently offering a complimentary 2 1/2 hour session, called “Impacting Engagement in 2011: The Leader’s Role,” in many major cities around the U.S. Here they reveal an advance peek at the results of their brand new global survey on employee engagement. Check out the time and location in…
The Institute for Corporate Productivity recently came out with four recommendations for putting in place an effective, robust process for managing and recognizing individual performance. Focusing, as is their wont, on the practices of high performing organizations, their research found that:
Boston Consulting Group, in conjunction with an association of people management associations worldwide, completed a comprehensive on-line + live interviews study on how they are approaching strategic human capital development for the next decade. It’s called “Creating People Advantage 2010” and worth downloading if you are concerned with the strategic element of human resources in…
Hewitt Associates have come out with another informative study, called The Current State of Performance Management and Career Development 2010. They surveyed HR professionals from 193 employers. On the performance side, it looks at how companies are using performance goals (the “what”) and behavioral competencies (the “how”) in their year end performance assessment process. Here…
“Don’t they get it?” said the executive, “If we don’t generate a good return to our shareholders, there won’t be any investment in the company. And, without investments, there won’t be any more company to give them their job. What more motivation do they need?” Do you hear a faint echo of your parents here?
I have been working lately with an organization that serves the homeless population by first finding them a place to live and then attending to their many needs. As with many non-profit enterprises these days, they have their share of frustrations that can tip staff morale down a notch or three: lack of adequate funding,…
I recently attended a “Leadership Briefing” presentation, organized by Leadership Fairfax, which featured two stimulating Towers Watson consultants, Max Caldwell and Jennifer Meder. The latest TW research is revealing that to generate a climate where your employees contribute at a consistently a high level of their capacity, you need more that just “engagement.” You must…
The research evidence continues to trickle in. The study I write about today was conducted by Green Peak Partners with the involvement of Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations School (my graduate alma mater, as it happens).
I recently read an article by Ezra Klein that made a strong case for not raising the age of eligibility for social security. In the U.S. it is going from 65 to 67. I have always assumed–without a lot of thought, I might add–that raising the retirement age was a no brainer way to reduce…
In the US Federal Government, as many studies have also shown for private industry, leadership–especially at the senior level–is the primary factor around how employees view their workplace. This comes from the 2010 report on The Best Places to Work in the Federal Government.
I’ve been approached by a prospective client who wants a workshop as part of an internal strategic initiative around communications between the levels. They want to focus on: 2-way communication, down to the employee and upward to the manager what should be communicated and when obstacles to communicating more openly how to solicit communication from…
Robert Rosen, CEO of the management consulting firm Healthy Companies International, reported in the July/2010 issue of Leadership Excellence magazine on conclusions gleaned from interviews of top executives in forty countries over the past 20 years. He and his team was looking for the attributes of the best leaders. They singled out five key characteristics:…