Do You Bail Your People Out? Rescue Management Diminishes Employee Accountability

I recently had a VP tell me that she had assigned one of her directors the task of doing a comparability study of their company’s compensation and benefits vis-à-vis other companies in their industry.  After the director had completed the study, the VP grilled the director on his findings.  The director had a difficult time answering the questions that she asked and came across as lacking in confidence. The VP was then faced with a dilemma: should she make the presentation to the Board of Trustees herself or should she run the risk of allowing the director to make the...

Do You Empower Your People? 10 Strategies for Empowering Others

When I was in my first job in corporate America, I had a one-of-a-kind manager. The first thing he did when meeting with me was to ask me what I wanted to become and what my vision of my future career looked like. I really hadn’t given it much thought, and so I candidly told him so. Always abounding in patience, he began by asking me a series of well-thought out questions that made me think.

Why Do People Become Defensive? Six Factors That Influence Defensiveness

Recently I held a number of open office hours online to answer questions that people had about emotional intelligence. By far the most frequently asked question was, “Why do people become so defensive?” Perhaps the easiest way to understand defensiveness is to understand what makes each of us defensive.

Are You Answering the Call? 13 Questions to Improve the Quality of Your Leadership

One day this week when I was working at home the upstairs phone began to ring. Since I was busy, I ignored the call, figuring the answering machine would pick it up. During the next hour, the phone rang at least three more times.

What Freedom Do You Value Most? Seven Freedoms That You May Take For Granted

My uncle Mel passed away after living a wonderful life. He was one of those brave souls who fought in World War II and was lucky to make it home. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was a member of 87th Infantry Division that came up from the south on the west side of Bastogne.

11 Questions for Evaluating Your Effectiveness

I was recently facilitating a class for executives teaching them how to hold potentially difficult conversations. One of the attendees asked me, “With all that we already have to do, is this really all that important?” I walked to the whiteboard and drew a picture

15 Tips for Providing Effective Feedback

After becoming a new manager, I will never forget the first time I had to give constructive feedback to a member of my team.

9 Tips for Creating a Positive Change in Your Culture

Many of the organizations that I have worked in this year are involved in dramatic change. They are doing more to meet the increasing demands of customers in order to compete with companies within their industry. They are implementing new productivity standards which is causing them to measure more effectively the behaviors of their employees and the return on investment for the implementation of newly defined competencies. Because we usually get what we measure,

6 Tips on Improving Results

I recently had a manager explain to me that he had a department with over 200 employees and that his biggest challenge was a lack of productivity.  When I asked him what he meant by that he stated, “I just don’t understand why people can’t do what I ask them to do!” When people fail to meet our expectations or perform poorly, they may offer any number of reasons, excuses, or stories in explanation for their lack of results. These explanations should signal that “fake talk” has occurred and may be occurring again. From our research, we have identified a number...

Cues for Connecting with Generation Z

Awhile back I wrote an article detailing ideas for connecting with various generations.

Without Vision A People Perish

When I was a boy growing up in Redlands, California, my father would often take me with him to view cultural events on summer evenings at the Redlands Bowl.  This outdoor venue was a wonderful place to view opera, plays, band concerts, and numerous famous singers. One evening as we sat waiting for the performance to begin, my dad leaned over and asked me, “What do you think that means?” At the top of the proscenium were these words, “Without Vision A People Perish.”  Being only about 10 years old at the time, I contemplated the wisdom of...

Can You Unify Your Team?

8 Tips for Increasing Team Unity By John R. Stoker Before the start of the college football season, the head coach of the local university’s football team announced that he had decided to take the football players’ names off of each of their jerseys, not uncommon in college football.  However, in place of their names, he proposed having the team’s motto of “Tradition. Spirit. Honor” printed instead.  Because the team members were unhappy with this change, they called a team meeting to express their displeasure at the coach’s decision.  The players told the coach they believed that displaying their last names on their...

Successfully Managing Remote Employees: 10 Tips for Improving Your Remote Leadership Skills

I recently met with a friend and asked him what his current greatest challenge was. He responded that managing a number of remote employees was proving to be harder than he anticipated.

Nine Tips for Building Trust and Inspiring Confidence

One afternoon as I was passing through the airport on my way home, I ran into a colleague of mine, Stephen M. R. Covey, the author of the book, The Speed of Trust. We stopped and exchanged a few pleasantries. I could tell that he needed to get through security, so I bid him safe travels. As he was hurrying away, I yelled after him, “I know something faster than the speed of trust.” He yelled back, “What’s that?”

12 ways to destroy employee engagement

Employee engagement is one of the focal points for improving business results.