Are You Ready for the New World of Work?

Why Stars Sometimes Fail as Leaders

A bright and promising software engineer, we’ll call him Jay, had made a real mark on his company, developing and innovating some of the most important products and processes in the organization’s portfolio. One Friday, Jay’s boss called him into his office and told him,  “You’re so good at what you do that we’ve decided […]

Discretionary Effort…When the Show Must Go On

This past Sunday morning at 8:30, a leader named Ashley learned that a key member of her team had called in sick – totally legit –  quarantined with the flu, and would therefore not be at work that day for her 2:00 shift. Not good.  OK, you say, people call in sick all the time. […]

Sometimes It’s the Little Things

When Alejandro Bustamante became president of Plantronics Mexico some years ago, he inherited, among other problems, a dispirited workforce with dysfunctionally high employee turnover. Nobody wanted to work there. Charged with turning around the plant, which makes telephone headsets and other communications gear, Alejandro knew he could do nothing to change the people working in […]

What Do You Mean, Contented Cows?

If you’ve been following our work over the last 20 years or so, you could skip this post (but please don’t). You know what the reference to Contented Cows is all about, and therefore our reason for titling this blog “Daily Dairy”. But keep reading. A refresher never hurts. However, if you’re new to Contented Cows, and a lot of […]

The ONE Thing that Builds Employee Engagement More than Anything Else

A young(ish) audience member came up to me at a conference I was set to speak at last year, and said, (I’m paraphrasing throughout, but not much) “Richard, I’ve read the conference program, and I see that you’re going to be speaking on Employee Engagement later today. What’s the one thing – the ONE thing,” he […]

Growing Pains – How do I Fit in Around Here?

“If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” – Steve Jobs People involved in the work of any organization, large, small, or somewhere in between, need to know how they fit in with the purpose of the enterprise. This doesn’t get any easier […]

It’s Not About the Phones

If I hear this question one more time… I won’t be surprised. “How do we get these people to get off their phones and get their work done?” First point: it’s not about the phones. The phones are irrelevant. They simply represent yet another distraction, and, let’s be honest, a tool which most of us (irrespective […]

Workplace Productivity in the Post-Inauguration Period

Psst! Psst! Yeah, you. Look around. Listen. What do you hear? Does your workplace look and sound like it usually does? I bet it doesn’t. Odds are that more people than usual are paying attention to news portals, be it television, radio, social media, or other digital news outlets. I’ll venture too that there is […]

On Being the New Sheriff

As of noon today, for those of us in the US, there will be, as we say, a new sheriff in town. Based on the popular vote, more than half (about 54%) of those who voted in November’s presidential election were disappointed in its outcome. But the Electoral College vote is what counts, quirks and […]

All Millennials Are…Different

Years ago, I participated in a diversity workshop that featured an exercise called “All Iowans are Naive”, the object of which was to expose the fallacy of stereotypes. And fallacious they are. I have two close friends who hail from the state of Iowa, and both are exceptionally savvy. Other combos in the game were […]