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…
Category: Human Resources Management
Dealing with Bullying in the Workspace
Bullying seems inescapable in modern life, whether the context is school-aged children, adults in the workspace, or newly elected politicians behaving badly. The associated consequences and handwringing prompt us to…
A Few Words on Workplace Feedback for Millennials
Over the last few years I’ve had the pleasure of providing professional coaching for a diverse group of a dozen or so Millennial professionals, managers, and executives in the workspace.…
Should We Stop Doing Performance Reviews?
For the past few years there has been a hue and a cry, joined of late by large numbers of HR professionals, suggesting that companies need to stop doing traditional…
Work-Life Balance… Learning to Like and Live With Chocolate Milk
In a presentation last week for a group of healthcare industry managers, I was asked to comment on “work-life balance.” My remarks were prefaced with the admission that I’m fairly…
Getting Beyond the Rehearsed Blather in Recruiting
Last week I had a short, informal coaching conversation with an experienced, level 2 retail manager. Soon to be involved with staffing a new store, he was concerned about the…
Bad Apples
Recently, in preparation for a long, 1200-mile road trip (nasty winter weather coupled with living in a high airfare market causes one to do things like that), I shopped for…
Go Ask Your People
One of the traps that newly appointed managers at any level commonly fall into is in believing that, to be worthy of their job title and pay check, they must…
On Broken Glass, Apologies, and Obamacare
When I was fourteen, I took over a friend’s paper route for the summer. I don’t quite remember how that came to pass (I doubt that I was jumping for…
Sometimes It IS About the Money
https://contentedcows.com/blog/item/46-sometimes-it-is-about-the-money Few issues in the domain of business are thornier, more complex, and emotion-packed than that of how much money to pay someone for the work they do. Employee compensation thrusts…