Be Quicker and More Courageous in Dealing with New Hires
Whether one works in the public eye or not, somewhere in the 50 to 100 day window after a person has started a new job, people around them are forming some pretty strong impressions about whether or not “this dog is going to hunt” as they say in Mississippi. I’ll let you in on a […]
New “Best Companies to Work For” List Revealed
Last night, @AlanSMurray and the Fortune Magazine editors and journalists revealed for the twentieth time their annually curated list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For in America.” The list is special to me, for two reasons. First, my most significant employment experience prior to branching out on my own was at an early stage FedEx. Our HR […]
Good Leaders Look Beneath the Surface
One of the most remarkable people I ever worked with was a bank teller named Donna, at a bank branch I managed early in my career. Donna was a customer magnet. Brilliant. Hard working. Always went the extra mile. She was a single mother, and she’d been a teller for 12 years. I recommended to […]
Don’t Overwork Your Horses
New supervisors quickly learn that it’s to their advantage to know at all times who the most willing and productive people are on their team, who the ‘work horses’ are. These are the people with seemingly endless capacity to reach for and find another gear, and crunch their way thru whatever pile of work is […]
Great Cakes Start with Great Ingredients
In what little ‘me time’ she has, my wife is an avid baker. As such, she has long maintained that “great cakes start with great ingredients.” That axiom is every bit as true in the workspace as it is in the kitchen, most especially when it comes to management talent. I was reminded of this […]
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 take a swing at it, at least as far as the workspace component is concerned. What Bullying Is and Isn’t: Bullying is the misuse of […]
Five Things You Can Do To Hire Smart
People the world over are watching intently as a new U.S. presidential administration goes through its staffing up process, taking notes and names as to who’s in, who’s out, who’s on the fence, what the relative merits of each candidate are, who’s calling the ball, the list goes on. One can only hope that the […]
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. Though it is a disparate group other than the age cohort, we’ve individually uncovered and worked on a fairly short list of remarkably common performance […]
Bad Bosses are Bad Business
Who among us would keep seeing a dentist who was lousy at administering anesthesia? Or would knowingly board an airplane piloted by someone who’d never really learned to fly? I think I know the answer. So why, then, do so many of us tolerate people in management positions who have demonstrated a remarkable ineptitude for […]
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 joy at the notion of getting up every morning at 4AM), but here’s something I do remember from that experience. One of my ‘customers’ on the […]