Coaching & Motivating

7 reasons why employees disengage and quit

June 24, 2022
Think of your employees as all sitting in the same rowboat. You like to think they’re all pulling hard on those oars together. But based on recent Gallup polling, only about a third of employees (34%) are busting their butts (actively engaged).

Survive a ‘kiss-up/kick-down’

May 27, 2022
You know them, right? The climbers. The game players. The two-faced team members. Sometimes referred to as Machiavellian, they are perhaps more succinctly referred to as “kiss-up/kick-down” employees.

Here comes the summer help!

May 26, 2022
How to welcome, prep and manage those seasonal employees.

How to manage the office Eeyore

May 13, 2022
Every office tends to have one: that glum, withdrawn and isolated loner. They remind you of Eeyore, that fictional character in the Winnie the Pooh stories, the pessimistic donkey who is perpetually gloomy. How do you manage an office Eeyore?

Key phrases for rewarding teams

April 8, 2022
A team rewards system can be tricky, even a political landmine if your words aren’t chosen very carefully. Try these guidelines and corresponding sample phrases come from Linda Eve Diamond’s book, Perfect Phrases for Building Strong Teams.

How to create no-stress urgency

March 25, 2022
You know you need to light a fire under your team, but you don’t want to sap their productivity by piling on stress. Can pressure and support coexist? The answer is yes, thoughtfully. Here are some ideas for how to approach this situation.

‘Not good enough. No!’: Essential tips for managing a perfectionist

March 25, 2022
When considering the various types of problematic personalities one might encounter in a work environment, dealing with a perfectionist may not sound all that bad. However, actual perfectionists (not just ones who pay lip service during interviews) can cause their share of office chaos.

Stifle your staff’s blame game

March 25, 2022
Technology leader Nickolas Means gave a talk in 2008 about the lessons we can learn from one of the great engineering disasters in history: the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in March 1979.

Rate your skills with those stubborn, hard-to-manage employees

January 28, 2022
Managing someone with whom you have a personality clash can be difficult. But good managers know how to separate emotions from the work at hand. Use this self-audit to see how well you do at this task.

How ‘prediction culture’ undermines your leadership

January 12, 2022
One of the conversational habits leaders can succumb to is constant forecasting. In the book Conversation Transformation, authors Ben Benjamin, Amy Yeager and Anita Simon dissect this tendency.