Smart Leaders Hire Smarter Employees
One of the challenges that every manager faces is to attract and keep the best talent in the field. Success at this aspect of management is not a matter of luck; instead, there is both an art and a science to recruiting, developing and retaining high-caliber staff. Here’s an overview of the five key components to this essential skill: Attract the best talents The first step to attracting the most talented employees is to see HR’s function as integral with the company’s branding; job candidates with excellent skills are going to be...
read moreMaking Remote Teams Productive
Teams are the moving parts of larger organizations. Today, more than three quarters of knowledge workers do their work always or frequently in virtual teams. WHY IS THIS HAPPENING ? Global companies want to bring skills and knowledge from all over the world to bear on a project. They cluster many experts and support staff in “centers of excellence” where they have the support to be most productive. This lets the company tap global expertise to meet any challenge. Workers based in a center of excellence usually participate in...
read moreFostering Engagement in Remote Teams
Once upon a time, with exception of salespeople and repair crews, everyone worked in offices with other people from their company. That still true for a lot of people, but today more than three quarters of the companies listed in Fortune Magazine’s “Best Companies to Work For” have people working remotely. That offers all the old challenges along with some new ones. Engagement is an on-going challenge. Despite years of attempting to improve things, most consulting firms who survey engagement say that a maximum of 30% of the...
read moreHow To Start Strong And Continue The Momentum
The New Year has lots offer to those who are action-takers, who are ready to leap forward and have a breakthrough year. It’s crucial that you start the New Year with passion and a clean slate. The old year is behind us .You may still bask in the success of last year, and maybe it’s still worth a few kudos. But this won’t last. Having set the bar, you’ll be expected to have a strong kick off to deliver a stunning first quarter. Otherwise, you’ll be climbing uphill all year. Maybe last year wasn’t so hot. Maybe it started out...
read moreGreat Expectations: Why New Year’s Resolutions Fail
As the year draws to a close, we invariably begin to reflect on what we did in the past eleven or twelve months. We compare our successes with our shortcomings. We think about things that didn’t turn out quite the way we expected; and we start thinking about how much more dedicated we’ll be next year than we were during this one. On a personal level, diets and fitness regimes are at the top of the agendas of most people. At a corporate level, the ambitions are a bit more serious. Profits are seen to be too small, in most cases, and costs...
read moreFor Executive Women Seeking C-Suite Success
What do these people have in common? Marissa Mayer – Yahoo Meg Whitman – Hewlett-Packard Patricia Woertz – Archer Daniels Midland Indra Nooyi – PepsiCo Pam Nicholson – Enterprise Holdings They’re all women, of course. And they’re also all CEOs. Beyond that they’re very different, except for one important thing: Once they were in a situation just like the one you’re in now. At some point in their career, each of those successful women had to decide if she wanted to commit herself to the time and...
read moreTime Management: It’s More Than Avoiding the Urgent
There are probably very good reasons why the time management system that contrasts the important/unimportant and urgent/not urgent is the most popular. For one thing, it can be simple and easily understood. Like so many management models, it can be explained in a simple two-by-two fashion. Another reason the model is popular is that managers have found that it helps them to establish their priorities and, as a result, to get more done. Even when things are ticking over as they should, there never seems to be enough time to do what’s...
read moreKeep Your Eye on the Ball
Over time, many companies lose their way. They reach a point where they no longer know who they are, where they are going, or why. They start out to do one thing, but then they gradually migrate into something else. And most of them do so for all the wrong the reasons. Some organizations do this by deliberately leaving behind their original products. Time’s online magazine has cited companies such as Xerox, Nokia, and Apple as examples. Other companies deliberately pursue a new path, but realizing their mistake, retreat back...
read moreWhy are there so few women in top leadership roles?
Why are there so few women in top leadership roles? We’ve been working on this issue for a very long time and we’ve made some progress, but not at the top. Women college graduates outnumber men in the United States. About a third of fulltime MBA students are women. Women hold nearly 40 percent of managerial positions. But when we look at the C-Suite, the situation is very different. Women only hold about nine percent of top leadership positions. Only about four percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. People come at this...
read moreOrganizational Resistance to Organizational Change
As a discipline, the management of organizational change has been in existence for more than 50 years; yet we are no closer now to making it effective than we were then. Nearly three-quarters of all such endeavors fail miserably. Not only do companies fall well short of their financial targets, but untold psychological damage is done, both to those who lose their jobs, and those who don’t. Traditionally, the blame for all this has been laid at the door of employees. The presumption has been that the leaders “did the right things,” but...
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