Your employees are watching you, and they're being influenced by your behavior, for better or worse. Are you leading by example? Are you behaving in a way that you want your people to emulate? Are your actions always in the best interest of the team and organization? If you are leading by example, you aren't relying on your words alone to guide your employees. Certainly it … [Read more...]
Boosting Self-Esteem is the Key to High Performance
Self-esteem is relatively scarce in the world and in your workplace. If you don't believe that, it's probably because: You have a healthy self-esteem and so you assume others do, or it never crosses your mind. You don’t have it, and are in denial, (or think you are the only one with weak or low self-esteem). Your people seem to have good self-esteem Self-esteem … [Read more...]
Stop Letting Procrastination Hold You Back
We all procrastinate sometimes. Some people make it a way of life. Either they put off tasks they dread or they simply thrive when producing work at the last minute. Many people, however, wish they procrastinated less. They scold themselves for creating unnecessary stress or regret their time management when they produce less-than-stellar work. Of all the comments I’ve … [Read more...]
6 Steps to Spur Your Team to Work Together
On your team, you want everyone working together, striving to hit the same goals. It seems like it ought to be easy. After all, everyone is on the same team. However, the more people who are involved on your team and in your organization, the harder all that becomes. People create their own goals and purposes for work. They become more self-focused and seem to have less of a … [Read more...]
You Are Responsible for Making Work Fun. Here’s why.
Work and fun. Maybe you've never thought about those two words in the same sentence. There are certainly people who don’t equate those two ideas together, or while they wish it could be true to have fun at work, they’ve never really experienced it. My premise is that work can be fun, at least some of the time and it should be that way. This isn’t some new-age, fluffy, … [Read more...]
Change the Way You Think About Mistakes
Whether we are talking about an honest one, a little one, or a great big oh #$%^&@! one, we all have made mistakes. I’ve come to believe that the way we view and how we respond to them plays a huge role in our attitude, approach and results in life. How we view mistakes determines how (or whether) we use them to make our lives and results better ... or not. If we see … [Read more...]
Onboarding is Your Responsibility
Ninety-one percent of first-year employees stay on with an organization, if the onboarding process was successful—and nearly 60% will remain after three years. Those are beautiful stats, especially when you consider the high cost of turnover and the burgeoning talent shortage. Effective onboarding is one of (if not the) most critical things leaders can do, and yet, so many … [Read more...]
Work-Life Balance is More Than Just a Cliché
Hopefully, you found time this weekend to relax, have some fun, spend time doing something you love, and re-energize before this week started. I talk about the importance of relaxation often on this blog, because I think it is critical to leaders' success, especially new leaders who likely are feeling a totally different set of pressures than their more tenured … [Read more...]
Start the New Year Off Right With This Simple Exercise
New Year's Eve is just days away, and I want to share a short exercise with you that will be fun, informative and might be the most valuable 90 minutes you’ve spent in a long while. It is possible you could take longer than 90 minutes, and you could perhaps spend a bit less time, but if you will give yourself just 90 minutes on New Year's Eve to do what follows, you will be … [Read more...]
7 Tips to Celebrate Your Team’s Progress
Celebration is often a challenging topic for leaders. They wonder if they should celebrate and when it's appropriate to do so. You tend to see two extremes: Those who don't celebrate anything because employees "already know they are succeeding so why waste time celebrating?" and those who celebrate every-single-thing along the way. The best solution (as is the often the … [Read more...]