I’m preparing to take my kids into Target, Lord help me. I just need to get some necessities. I park the car, turn and look them in the eye and tell them, “We are not going to the toy section. We are here to get milk, a card for someone, and some toilet paper. You will both walk beside me and the cart. You will not run, and you will not ask if you can go look at toys, okay?” I get “yes ma’am”. And then ask them to repeat back to me what I just said and what they
Much has been said about the open office floor plan. The concept arose out of Silicon Valley and became a popular way to supposedly create “collaborative” work environments where innovation happens. Oh, and as an added bonus, companies saved a lot of money designing office spaces as open. I’m not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg- the realization that money could be saved this way, or that “collaboration” and therefore innovation would thrive in this type of design. But in many studies, including this one: The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration, it was found
We conducted a focus group about a year ago with a group of business leaders around the idea of organizational values and culture. In this focus group, we presented seven key values, based on research that defined organizational culture. The goal was to see what these professionals thought about these seven values in the context of a broader assessment product. And whether this values set could predict a company’s culture in order to match candidates to cultures that align with individual the candidates’ values. Often things like this come down to semantics, but one piece of feedback where there was
Last week, during a meeting with a client’s leadership team, we got on the topic of just how much time they spend each week in meetings. One of the managers told me that meetings take up about five to six hours of his day, every day! That only leaves him two hours to get his work accomplished. When I asked him to tell me about his meetings, his list went something like this: 8 AM- Meeting with team 1 to discuss issues 9 AMM- Meeting with team 2 to determine what issues from 8 AM meeting are critical 10 AM-
Immigration is a hot topic whether you have an opinion on it or not. And most people do. This isn’t a post to comment on to build or not build a wall, but to deal with the reality that immigration scrutiny is on the rise for businesses. Are you prepared as a business leader for what that means? One reality is that it is harder to get and keep visas for those who are not U.S. citizens. One proposed change being discussed to H1-B Visas is to limit them to only positions that have a minimum salary of $130,000 a