In so many facets of life, we take things for granted once we get used to them. People are no exception. We get very excited about new relationships whether social, customer (see, for example, When a Company Is No Longer That into You) or recent hires. But, once they lose their honeymoon halo, we tend…
There is a huge gap between talent practices at large companies and those in the middle market. Large companies have gone through major transformation over the last 15 years, moving from manually based personnel processes to web enabled employee and manager self service. This change has allowed these companies to focus their HR teams on…
A recent HBR blog piece, And You Thought the Weekend Was Supposed to Be Fun, based on survey results from Germany, points out that for highly educated individuals, life satisfaction drops significantly on the weekend compared to during the work week. In contrast, lesser educated individuals pretty much maintain their life satisfaction levels over the…
When it comes to Developing managers the stakes are high. Do it properly and your employees will become engaged and make your customers happy. Do it poorly and your highest potential employees will leave and your customers will suffer. Yet, despite the clear evidence of the benefits of strong, engaging managers, most companies do not…
Great leaders are decisive. They consider risks — analytically and intuitively — and are able to make important decisions without costly delay. In fact, decisiveness is a critical measure of executive effectiveness. As with all strengths, however, decisiveness can be used improperly and become a weakness, even a fatal one. This is likely to happen…
A recent HBR blog piece — Do Customers Even Care about Your Core Competence? — sets the stage for bringing customer experience to the fore in designing talent management initiatives. The focus of the blog piece is that companies all too often think internally when identifying core competence rather than focusing on how core competence…
Let’s be truthful. A significant number of senior leaders lead by intimidation. One of the reasons why Donald Trump’s iconic “you’re fired” became so popular is because it’s exactly what can happen. Once, when I was conducting 360 assessments, a senior leader’s peers and subordinates complained to me that the leader responded to threats from…
When it comes to appointing leaders, we just can’t seem to help ourselves from naming the wrong person for the job. And this is as true for internal appointments as it is for outside hires. There are several reasons for this mistake: 1.Appointing Individual Contributors to Leadership Roles. This is a common occurrence. It happens…
We all know that conflict can be uncomfortable. And we all know people who stir up conflict for the sake of conflict. We do our best to avoid these people. But we need to learn to recognize the difference between good conflict related to ideas and bad conflict related only to personalities. There are four…
Innovation is the life blood of survival in today’s business world. Apple innovated, Blackberry didn’t; Google innovated, AOL didn’t, to give two examples. The question is how to foster innovation, particularly in a public company where existing products can easily trump future ideas, given the constant pressure to meet quarterly earnings expectations. A recent HBR…