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Brain Science Emotional Intelligence Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork

Praise – the cost-free incentive

What is the best way for a manager to motivate employees? The traditional answer would be to give them a cash bonus, but studies have shown that cash bonuses are becoming less effective. The practice has become so common that most employees now expect it – it’s just a part of their salary expectation. That […]

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Emotional Intelligence Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork Values and Behaviours

Incorporating fun into the workplace

Is your workplace having fun? As counterintuitive is it may seem, incorporating fun into the workplace can create a big boost in productivity. Indeed some of the most successful companies in the world are also some of the most fun places to work. Mind you, not every employer wants to follow Google’s example and start […]

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Emotional Intelligence Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Teamwork Values and Behaviours

4 key characteristics of effective leaders

I have spent many years working with, observing, teaching and coaching leaders. I have also heard many stories from employees about leaders they have loved to work for and those they have not enjoyed as much. There are some key themes that I have observed in leaders who are highly effective and get the best […]

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Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork Values and Behaviours

When culture is a killer

I was recently reading the reports of the inquest into the death of a Merrill Lynch intern who suffered an epileptic fit after working for 72 hours straight. The inquest returned a verdict of death from natural causes that “may have been triggered by fatigue” and has sparked debate about intern working conditions in highly […]

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Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork

Making employee engagement meaningful

Today’s guest post comes from Darren Sprod of Halogen Software: Organisations talk a lot about employee engagement, and some go to great effort and expense to install comforts and conveniences meant to put smiles on employee faces. But unless it matters to employees, it’s just another HR program that’s not helping to support business goals. While […]

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Change Leadership

Has your business got systems to help manage change?

Today’s post is from a guest – Mary Gardam, the Principal Quality Advisor at LogiQA. She brings us some useful tips on business systems to help you in managing change: Change in business is inevitable.  Whether it is driven by external factors such as changes to legislation or internal change such as new leadership, systems […]

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Emotional Intelligence Leadership Mindfulness reflection Values and Behaviours

The importance of values

I have been working a lot with clients on values recently and it led me to doing a new values elicitation exercise for myself. I last defined my values in 2004, as part of coaching I was getting to help me through a particularly challenging and draining work situation. I was interested to see if […]

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Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork Values and Behaviours

Employee watching – guess the culture!

On a recent trip for a conference, I had lunch with one of my clients at a restaurant in the casino complex. We were discussing organisational culture as we entered the restaurant, so as a learning experience and a bit of fun I asked my client to “guess the culture”. Her observations were: When we […]

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Brain Science Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork

Goal setting – handle with care!

Think back to your early experiences as a manager – your “Management 101 class”. You were probably given some training or direction on goal setting. It was likely a variation on the SMART acronym, and you would have been told that goals are good because having targets motivates people. All good and useful stuff. However… […]

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Change Emotional Intelligence Leadership Mindfulness Motivation reflection

5 reasons leaders need time out!

In working with leaders, and facilitating leadership programs, one of the key things I am hearing is that leaders are increasingly critically time poor. I had the pleasure of spending 2 days recently with a group of women leaders in a program and the key theme that came out was how valuable it was to […]