Create Insights Instead of Giving Feedback

“….But the most helpful advice is not a painting. It is instead a box of paints and a set of brushes. Here, the best team leaders seem to say, take these paints, those brushes, and see what you think you can do with them. What do you see, from your vantage point? What picture can you paint?” from Nine Lies About Work A few weeks ago, we talked about how neuro research shows us that for learning to happen, insights have to be created. We talk a lot about giving and receiving feedback in the workplace and how necessary it

5 Ideas for Retaining Talent in a Tough Labor Market

Most HR professionals and business leaders today are concerned about finding and keeping talent.  If you are going to focus on one, I’d suggest you start first by focusing on retaining talent. Broadly, the best way to retain talent is to create an environment where people have key needs met. These needs are described in Daniel Pink’s book Drive. They are 1) The need to direct their own lives 2) The desire to do better for ourselves and our world 3) To learn and create new things. But given these three things, what are some practices that can actually be

Why Attendance Occurrence Programs are Bad for Business

In 2003 I got one of those calls every child dreads. My mother was in the hospital and being rushed into emergency surgery. Turned out she had an allergic reaction to a medication and it almost killed her. She was at work when she started to notice something wasn’t right and within a matter of a couple of hours, her hands swelled up so much that she had to have emergency surgery to cut her hands open to relieve the pressure. She ended up with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and was in the Intensive Cardiac Care Unit for almost a week. Her

The Most Popular Emerging Employee Benefit is…

I remember thinking, how am I going to do this? I had just started my first full-time job out of college, and I was getting married that year.  I had been given two weeks of vacation for my first year that I had to earn throughout the year. If I wanted to take a honeymoon and be off a day or two before the wedding, I really had almost no time left to take off.  And a couple of my good friends were getting married that summer too, and I was in their weddings out of town. Was I going

When striving for a culture of “collaboration” kills your business

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