Early in 2007, Tom Coughlin, head coach of the New York Giants of the National Football League, was in danger of losing his job. His team had lost seven of their last nine games and was characterized by underachieving, in-fighting and bickering. Coach Coughlin had always been a no-nonsense hard-nosed football coach [...]
Read the rest of this entry »My wife has conducted a fair number of job interviews in recent years. One of the questions she always asks is: “What kind of supervisor do you prefer?” Never once has anyone said, “I’d love to be micromanaged.” Or, “I love it when my boss points out my mistakes and ignores what [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Having fun at work suffers from an image problem; hence it gets no respect. It has come to imply that you’re goofing off or messing around instead of attending to the business at hand. Well, that’s simply not true. Fun acts as a turbocharger in that it releases energy in people that [...]
Read the rest of this entry »In 1927, three Harvard professors conducted research at a Western Electric plant in an attempt to find out what caused employee productivity. They found that the simple act of paying positive attention to employees had the dominant impact. Today, nearly a century later, we’re still finding that the vast majority of employees are [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Negative bosses who make nasty comments to belittle or suppress those who work for them are a tremendous drain on the productivity of a business. The problem is that negative comments are hurtful and almost always ruin people’s days. When this occurs, it immediately sucks away people’s energy and now they are no longer able [...]
Read the rest of this entry »A research study recently reported in the Harvard Business Review found that the vast majority of employees are quite excited when they start a new job. This study also found that in 85 percent of the companies surveyed, this excitement declines sharply after the first six months and continues to decline for years afterward. One [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Author, Jim Collins, conducted research on leaders who were able to take their respective companies from being “good” to being “great.” As a result, he was able to identify some of the characteristics these leaders had in common. I would like to share two of them with you. First, these leaders possessed extreme personal humility. [...]
Read the rest of this entry »The biggest executive lie in the world goes something like this: “Our people are our most important resource.” A study quoted in The Invisible Employee by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton found that 90 percent of the executives surveyed said that people were their company’s greatest asset. Then, given the chance to rank strategies that [...]
Read the rest of this entry »The secret to being an effective boss is to recognize that people intentionally regulate the amount of effort they put into their jobs based upon how they feel they’re being treated. If they feel they’re being treated well, they will become excited about giving their absolute best efforts which means they’ll work way beyond their [...]
Read the rest of this entry »In their book, The Invisible Employee, Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton estimate the cost of employee turnover in America to be 1.7 trillion dollars annually. That’s a huge drain on American businesses. They also cite studies which point out that the biggest single reason people quit their jobs is the behavior of their immediate bosses–they [...]
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