As a leader, how effective are the one-to-one career conversations you have with your employees? If you’re thinking “what career conversations?” you might be setting the HR department up for its next round of exit interviews. Don’t feed the exit interview beast; use “stay interviews” instead. You can learn more about the concept of stay…
Team Effectiveness
Seven Gift-Giving Ideas for Your Boss
The gift-giving season is in full swing here in the United States, so I wrote a post for Smartblog on Leadership offering unique ideas for “gifts” that leaders can give their employees this year. Hint: there’s not a gift card or food basket on this list. Read more in 7 leadership gift-giving ideas for the…
How to Tend Your Company’s Cultural Garden
How much care is taken with your company’s values? Are they simply slogans on a banner in your lunchroom . . . or something deeply embedded in your organizational culture? And what happens when leaders make business decisions that fly in the face of those values? That’s what I write about in this month’s Smartblog…
Employee Engagement – Ignore the Outliers
This is a multi-part series on employee engagement based on my interview with New York Times best-selling author Kevin Kruse. As a former business owner and winner of a “Best Place to Work” award, Kevin has a wealth of real-life experience. I found him to be funny, down-to-earth and very reasonable in his approach to…
Employee Engagement – Colleagues Can Kill It Too
There’s a lot of talk about how “management” plays a key role in fostering employee engagement but they’re not the only ones who can kill employees’ morale. Oh, no, colleagues can do a mighty fine job with that as well. Kevin Kruse, author of Employee Engagement for Everyone calls the road-weary co-workers the “Downers” (referring…