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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
This is an article I wrote for Leaders in Heels. It got an extraordinary response and obviously resonated with their readers, so I thought I’d re-post it for readers of my blog. Management styles and when to use them is a topic every leader can take something from. Think back on your career and the […]
Confrontation and conflict between people is as old as…well…people. Any time you have humans operating together there are going to be times when people disagree, don’t get on, have differences of opinion or just plain can’t stand each other! So how should conflict be managed in teams? It is a mistake to think that no […]
I was meeting a business contact for a coffee recently and we started talking about getting the best out of people. My contact works in an industry that can be quite hierarchical and rules driven and can struggle to engage people. The question we talked over was “how do you get people to work harder”? […]
Whether you are gearing up for a business transformation in 2013, spending the holiday season with demanding relatives, or even getting ready for the apocalypse at the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21 (*smile*) here are some tips for building your resilience. Firstly, resilience is the ability to bounce back or recover well […]
Today I read two articles that I found interesting – one about the myth of multitasking and the other about emotional contagion. They got me thinking about just how powerful paying attention is as a leadership tool. The article on multitasking described how biologically we are incapable of attending to multiple tasks – our brains […]