Mar 04

8 Things You Can Do Daily That Will Boost Employee Engagement

Employee Engagement Is The Difference Between Success And Failure


By Gordon Tredgold
Founder and CEO, Leadership Principles
@gordontredgold

Employee engagement is running at around 32%. Which means that a staggering 68% of staff, potentially your staff, are either disengaged or even worse actively disengaged.  According to Gallup, this costs the US economy anywhere between $450 to $550 billion per year.

As a leader, you have the biggest impact on the engagement of your teams, and your number one goal should be to look to increase this as it will have a significant impact on the bottom line of your company.

Here are eight things we can do daily to help boost engagement.

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Mar 02

How Emotionally Intelligent People Run Meetings

Make meetings work for you with these two tactics.


By Nick Hobson
Behavioral scientist@NickMHobson

For many founders, meetings are the ultimate time-waster. More than ever, meetings are being forced down people’s throats. It’s OK. You can say it: They’re a royal pain.

Personal gripes aside, research has shown that meetings have increased in both length and frequency over the past 50 years. In the ’60s and ’70s, leaders spent roughly 10 hours a week in meetings; now it’s upwards of 25. Meetings for meeting’s sake happen all too frequently. It’s begun to impinge on individual productivity and, as a result, negatively influence large-scale company success.

Busy entrepreneurs simply can’t afford wasted time; nor can their startup’s bottom line. This is evident to the best performers. They schedule their days and weeks to get the most out of meetings and optimize their behavior. And in building these systems, they leverage what’s called “smart emotional design.”

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Mar 02

I retired at age 35 — here are 7 lessons I learned working in the corporate world

(https://www.marketwatch.com/story/7-things-i-learned-working-in-corporate-america-2018-03-08)

The good, the bad, the boring

Everett Collection

By STEVE ADCOCK

In some ways, it was better, but in others, not so much.
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Mar 02

People Who Are Happy at Work Asked These 6 Questions in Their Interview

While the prospect of asking an interviewer questions is undeniably daunting, a recent study found that people who ask follow-up questions are better liked (and, therefore, more likely to land a job) than those who do not. Not to mention, this is a job you’re considering spending 40 hours a week working (if not more)—it’s expected that you’ll have a few questions.

To find out which ones we should be asking, we tapped career coach Rose Keating. “The best questions to ask an interviewer are questions that are highly specific to the role, company, and industry you’re interviewing for,” she explains. “Ideally your questions will demonstrate that you’re critically thinking about how the role fits within the organization and how the company is competing within the industry.”

Ahead, a career coach with years of experience helping women land their dream jobs shares six of the most impressive questions to ask an interviewer, including two of the most common mistakes people make (and how to avoid them).

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Mar 02

Want to Be Irresistible to Hiring Managers? Do These 2 Things Immediately on LinkedIn

You can make recruiters come to you with this tip.

By J.T. O’Donnell
Founder and CEO, WorkItDaily.com @jtodonnell

Everyone dreams of having a top employer contact them about a job opening. The constant rejection that comes with job search is so intense, when you finally get an email or a call from a hiring manager, there’s a feeling of euphoria. This makes knowing how to decrease the rejection and increase the success rate a valuable skill.

2 Things on LinkedIn Will Help You Get More Interviews

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Mar 02

Create a Growth Culture, Not a Performance-Obsessed One

By:  Tony Schwartz
(https://hbr.org/2018/03/create-a-growth-culture-not-a-performance-obsessed-one)

Here’s the dilemma: In a competitive, complex, and volatile business environment, companies need more from their employees than ever. But the same forces rocking businesses are also overwhelming employees, driving up their fear, and compromising their capacity.

It’s no wonder that so many C-Suite leaders are focused on how to build higher performance cultures. The irony, we’ve found, is that building a culture focused on performance may not be the best, healthiest, or most sustainable way to fuel results. Instead, it may be more effective to focus on creating a culture of growth.

A culture is simply the collection of beliefs on which people build their behavior. Learning organizations — Peter Senge’s term — classically focus on intellectually oriented issues such as knowledge and expertise. That’s plainly critical, but a true growth culture also focuses on deeper issues connected to how people feel, and how they behave as a result. In a growth culture, people build their capacity to see through blind spots; acknowledge insecurities and shortcomings rather than unconsciously acting them out; and spend less energy defending their personal value so they have more energy available to create external value. How people feel — and make other people feel — becomes as important as how much they know.
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Mar 02

How to manage up when you have a bad boss

One of the tests of being a leader is knowing how to navigate a boss who doesn’t score highly as a leader him/herself.

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Mar 02

Want to Be a Better Leader? Stop Giving Orders and Do This Instead

There are all kinds of images people have when they think about a leader, but there is one you should forget.

By John Eades
Author, podcaster, and CEO of LearnLoft @johngeades

If I asked you to close your eyes and visualize a leader, what image would come to mind?

When I originally did the exercise, the first thought that came to my mind was a statue of a military general. For some reason, a general in the 1700’s with one leg on a giant rock pointing a sword to direct his troops into battle.

One could say, a commanding style of leader that came up with all of the plans, made decisions with the input of a few and received all the glory in victory or disappointment in defeat.

The image I saw seems to be a fairly popular answer. If it isn’t someone exactly like my military general, it tends to be someone who demonstrated some kind of command and control leadership style.  While this type of leadership has been effective in the past and is often what’s portrayed in movies, it struggles to be effective in today’s modern environment (one major exception a crisis situation)

Instead of listing off all of the reasons a commanding style of leadership is less effective in most situations, here is a modern definition of leadership I have settled on and covered in a recent episode of the Follow My Lead Podcast:

If your actions inspire, empower, and serve others to produce an improved state over an extended period of time, you are a leader.

If you can get behind this definition of leadership, here are a few ideas for how to live it out in your everyday work life:

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Aug 31

Why the secret to nailing an interview is the exact opposite of what everybody thinks

Why? Time is short. No one seems like the perfect fit. The chances for failure are uncomfortably high. The cost of a wrong decision can be astronomical.In the face of uncertainty, hiring decision makers want to make a safe choice. So when you are walking into the interview, get out of your own head and your own anxieties over proving you are worthy of the role. Safety is your key to the kingdom. And communicating safety, we’ve found, has less to do with convincing the decision maker of your capabilities, skills, or intelligence.The bottom line is this: You get fired on results but hired on perception. So how can we all exude safety in the room?

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Aug 31

Research: Do People Really Get Promoted to Their Level of Incompetence?

You’ve probably encountered managers you admire more for their technical skills than for their actual leadership skills.

Perhaps it’s the familiarity of this experience that lends the Peter Principle its popular appeal. The Peter Principle, laid out in a 1969 book by Dr. Laurence J. Peter, describes the following paradox: if organizations promote the best people at their current jobs, then organizations will inevitably promote people until they’re no longer good at their jobs. In other words, organizations manage careers so that everyone “rises to the level of their incompetence.”

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