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Job Descriptions No Longer Describe Jobs
The most accurate part of many job descriptions is “other duties as assigned.” The rest of it is just a dull list of responsibilities and qualifications lacking all context. I read them all the time...
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Great Recruiting is Useless …
Many people think the reason to engage a search firm is to get help with recruiting. Well, maybe that approach works in big companies, but in small firms great recruiting is nearly useless by itself....
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Your Best People Are Getting Calls
I just spoke with someone we placed last year. The good news is that she is happy and thriving, likes the direction of her organization and sees a bright future for herself. (Yeaa hiring process)....
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Why You Need to Keep Score
As human beings, we don’t like looking at our failures. So we tend not to keep score, or create hard metrics for our own performance. We’d rather not think about our mistakes and prefer to focus our...
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Thank You for Quitting
Surveys indicate that 2010 is going to be a year filled with employee turnover. And that is a great gift to every manager who is still not managing performance tightly. Every time an average employee...
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Managers with Really “High Standards”
“I need to warn you, Mary has really high standards.” You hear this kind of comment all the time in the workplace. But what does it mean, really? Is Mary some impossible-to-please overly...
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How the CEO Should Manage Managers
An article in Inc.com, by Darren Dahl recommends that CEOs pay more attention to managing their management team. The key is to set clear performance expectations, and then hold the person accountable....
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The One Question to Ask About Performance Problems
Imagine you are working under a tight deadline. You have a thousand other things to do and are relying on your employee Frank to give you a key piece of information. Your deadline passes and Frank...
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What Neuroscience Tells us About Employee Retention
Some people dismiss employee engagement research as ”too fuzzy.” Not me. We have successfully integrated key principles of employee engagement research into our recruiting process. I know it...
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Are Your People a Drag or a Sail?
We staff a lot of new initiatives. And we’re often brought in when executives want to rethink how they have staffed a position. So I regularly hear how executives talk about the intersection of...
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What Really Engages Employees?
A while back, the Washington Business Journal asked me to write something about the Gallup 2013 State of the American Workplace report. I’ve long thought that Gallup has it backward and said so in a...
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Want to use a Feedback Sandwich? Don’t You Dare.
In a recent post in the Washington Business Journal, I interviewed Dr. Alice Waagen about how to be more effective when managing employee performance. She had some great insights into how the context...
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And Now, For a Completely Different View of What Management Could Be
In the late 1970′s Tracy Kidder captured a new kind of work ethic and (at the time) a novel kind of management when he wrote the business classic, “The Soul of a New Machine.” It was a rollicking good...
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Determining Salary for a New Hire? Think Like a Compensation Pro
Salary negotiations with top performers are a pivotal time in the hiring process. As an employer, it’s easy to forget that the candidate is not yet one of your employees. You can create or destroy...
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Chronic Employee Turnover Is Almost Never About the Employees
Senior executives often call me when they are at their wits end with people on their team: “I’ve tried to make things work, but my VP of HR is just not delivering the results I need.” “My...
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When You Undervalue HR, You Undercut Your Managers’ Effectiveness
One of the fastest ways to sabotage your business results is to hire the cheapest HR professionals you can find. When you saddle your executive team with under-staffed (or under-skilled) HR support,...
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