Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to hang out with an assortment of highly successful facebook page owners and administrators. The include the manager of a popular band, two Fortune 500 Company Social Media Directors and the CEO of a firm that manages hundreds of high traffic-high profile pages. Collectively, they’ve given me some good advice…
DetailsI remember a VP once told me not to get too close to my team. This way, it would be easier to discipline those who were not achieving. Just yesterday, my son asked me if I ever had to fire anyone. I told him I do not believe in firing people. As he persisted, I…
DetailsI have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it. – Walt Disney Back when the telegraph was the fastest means of long-distance communication, there was a story about a young man who applied for a job as a Morse code operator. Answering an ad in…
DetailsHow many of your employees are simply not engaged any more? Are there some who seem to just be going through the motions of their job? Yeah, they show up every day. They do the essential tasks. They don’t miss deadlines or cause any major screw ups. But something is clearly missing. The spark has…
DetailsIn part one I expressed my despair that companies don’t do a more thorough job of selecting salespeople. My concerns stem from my years in the sales training business where I was too often brought into a company and asked to basically train pigs to fly. They wanted to train salespeople who, at best, should…
DetailsWhen hiring for a position as critical as sales, I’m always surprised that companies don’t take the time to test candidates better than they do. I recognize that the HR department is ill equipped to test salespeople beyond the standard personality or temperament assessment but, even then, most seem loath to use these tools. It’s…
DetailsUnless you’ve just crawled out from under a rock, you have most likely heard about the new free micro-blogging sensation www.twitter.com . Twitter is currently one of the fastest growing social network sites, just behind Facebook and MySpace with over 55 million visitors per month.
Complaining not only ruins everybody else’s day, it ruins the complainer’s day, too. The more we complain, the more unhappy we get. – Dennis Prager The story is told of a cowboy out West driving down a dirt road, his dog riding in the back of the pickup truck, his faithful horse in the trailer…
DetailsI’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…
DetailsYears ago when I was taking courses from University Associates around how to facilitate groups, a wise instructor, Larry Porter, said these three words: trust the process. I have never forgotten them. They have been my anchor at critical times when in a team building session the conversation seems about to get out of hand.…
Detailsby Bill George with Peter Sims John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007 ISBN #978-0-7879-8751-0 Reviewed by Ian Cook How do you become and remain an authentic leader?
DetailsI was struck by a local news item in The Washington Post on Brian Betts, a model middle school principal, who was found gunned down in his home. While the story obviously includes the murder aspect, I was touched by the leadership angle. Rising to a challenge: Here was a white man who took over…
DetailsWelcome to 2007! I know… you don’t want to read another “Set your goals for the New Year” column. Good, because I don’t want to write about that either. However, I do feel compelled to write about the importance of communicating your value to others to improve your net worth. I’m not talking about financial…
DetailsMuch is made of delivering value to shareholders. Ask any senior director, manager or member of the board what his or her goal is in the company, and that will be the most likely response. It’s predictable, and it’s a cop-out. More on that in a moment. The term shareholder refers to those who have…
DetailsHow much information should a leader really share with employees? Some bosses are like Col. Jessup played by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men in thinking their employees “can’t handle the truth.” Communication continues to be cited as a problem in nearly all organizations. Solving communication problems is kind of like finding a cure…
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