I’ve always been a list maker. I love to make a list at the end of each work day, so I can draw a red line through item after time the following work day. And, by the way, I don’t just do this for work. I do it for everything: grocery list, kid’s activities for the week, Christmas shopping list, cleaning for the week and the list goes on and on. I’m the queen of lists. That being said, even though I’m a list maker, I’m still not as organized as I would like to be. But, when I began
Quite a while ago, I wrote about the “Es of LEadership” with empathy being one of them. Not included in these essential “Es” was “expectations”. And as the article on empathy points to, sometimes managing expectations and having empathy seem to be in direct conflict. Setting, communicating, monitoring and maintaining expectations is a critical skill for leaders. We must maximize performance of others through effectively setting expectations high and constantly pushing others to reach higher. When we do so, we provide meaningful and challenging work, which has been shown to increase worker satisfaction leading to higher productivity (and profits). Yet
“This is why I’m not married anymore,” said a participant in a recent leadership training class. She was partly kidding, but it was obvious that the results of her personality assessment, which were being used to launch the leadership training series we were conducting for her company, had struck a cord. Her personality assessment showed that she was a highly dominant, take charge, get it done kind of person. These characteristics had served her well in her role in finance with the organization, but she realized that maybe her personality had impacted the success of her marriage. In another conversation
You’re worried you’re not attracting the right talent or that you aren’t able to keep good talent around for long and you think it might be because of your salary structure. Before you launch into a compensation structure overhaul (we’ll tell you how to do this next week on the blog), you need to: Know for sure that the reason you are having the problems you are having is in fact compensation related. It may be that all your supervisors are jerks and people may leave even if you paid them twice as much. Surveying employees, especially through exit
“The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.” John Green, The Fault in Our Stars According to my editorial calendar, I’m supposed to be writing about job shadowing today, but I’ve noticed something. In the past week I’ve had conversations with three people about their work. One just quit. One is DONE with her work and is planning her quit, and one just realized she wants to quit, but hasn’t started the plotting of her exodus yet. (By the time I see her again next week though, I imagine