“Why don’t you just tell them that?” “Huh?” my client invariably says. “You want high performers, but you think your employee is uncoachable, not listening, and acting out?” “That’s what I’m saying, yes.” “So just say that,” I say. “But how would they respond? They might quit! I can’t start a conversation when I don’t…
Let’s talk about “employee problems.” Because they’re bullshit. There’s no such thing as an employee problem. I’ll explain. Last week in part two, I offered a simple question as a tool to create engagement for employees: “What don’t you like about yourself, and how can I help you use your job to change it?” A…
I admit I was a bit afraid to hit “send” on last week’s article–not only because I wrote “bullshit” fifteen times, but because it deeply challenged leaders and managers to get real. But it got the best feedback this year, so I wrote a part two. Who knows, maybe it’s a series? Do you want…
It seems managers hate hiring more than they hate hiring mistakes. Hiring is a deadly combination of mission-critical and poorly executed. People avoid it like crazy. It’s uncomfortable, time-consuming, and they just want to get it over with. Many businesses create all of their problems through regular hiring mistakes. I’m going to let you in…
Amazon bought my customer loyalty again. I recently bought a compost tumbler from them. It was a bit smaller than I’d thought. I might need a second. Putting it together sucked: sixty-two screws and two hours. I had to undo and redo forty minutes of work because the instructions were so bad. I was almost…
Which is more dangerous: a chainsaw or a limiting belief about a chainsaw? When I was too young to remember, my father rented a chainsaw to take out a large tree in our backyard. At one point, the chainsaw wound down after a cut and he lacerated the inside of his wrist–yeah, where the arteries…
One of the most common complaints I hear from business leaders is a lack of employee responsibility. Employee engagement is a huge issue in many businesses, and it’s often invisible. Employee engagement studies estimate it costs the U.S. economy $370 billion a year. I’ve noticed in the last ten years, airlines stopped apologizing for flight…
“Is this going to be on the test?” a student inevitably asks. The question used to make my blood boil, and I didn’t understand why until years later. It is in many ways the birth of employee disengagement and mediocrity, which plague workplaces, and the world, today. It’s not the student’s fault–they’re having an intuitive…
“I can’t talk with my employees about their personal problems.” Usually, when I hear people say this, they’re actually not going personal enough. The result is lost time and money while people talk around personal problems instead of addressing them head-on. There’s a great deal of confusion about what is okay to talk about in…
What is the root of virtually every problem in your world? It’s actually very simple. “The trouble with people is not that they don’t know but that they know so much that ain’t so.” –Josh Billings, American humorist Ironically this quote is usually attributed to Mark Twain or Will Rogers. What Billings points out so…