Leadership

How do you encourage employees to think like owners, to take initiative, to participate, to follow through, and contribute to the growth and success of your organization each and every day? This is…

Most of us have had the opportunity to work under great, and unfortunately not so great, leaders. More than likely when you worked with great leaders you delivered high levels of discretionary effort…

Leadership requires confidence in one’s ability to make good decisions. Yet that confidence does not guarantee quality in the decision making. Sometimes confidence isn’t well founded. The dark side…

When I was in college, I worked in a food distribution warehouse loading trucks. It was backbreaking work. We would load five trailers per day—each load weighing about 25,000 pounds! We loaded the…

Every business goal is driven by human behavior. It follows then that your employees’ performance—their behavior and results—is the most important output of your role as a leader. Considering that…

No, the image above is not an iStock photo nor one taken from a safety magazine. This is a live action shot I took from the window of a hotel where I was conducting a Safety Leadership workshop for a…

Is it possible that the walls really do have eyes? Even Santa understands that rewards should not be given unless they are earned, so he has created the elf on the shelf—a person whose job it is to…

Let me start with the bottom line.  Toxic bosses never bring out the best in people. They are bosses who exhibit the kind of behavior that proves detrimental to an employee personally, to their…

We all look forward to paying our taxes, right? It’s always nice to know that our hard-earned dollars are going to be used responsibly. Or are they? A search for ‘government waste’ on Google returns…

Attracting and keeping your best performers continues to be not only a smart business decision but a very strategic one that all companies invest in. While some believe attracting talent is the first…

If you look around the workplace today, whether your company is thriving or fighting to stay alive, it’s not uncommon to see and feel uncertainty. The instability of the marketplace, vying for top…

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, then you are a leader.” —John Quincy Adams   It has been almost a decade since Measure of a Leader was published yet…

How a leader provides feedback is one of those distinguishing factors between being a leader by title and being a truly effective leader.  The delivery of frequent feedback allows for continuous…

Like Bill Murray in the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, every day for some people feels like a repeat of the last. Seemingly no matter what they do, nothing changes. Each day greets them with the same…

The following is a copy of an actual letter sent by Sam Walton of Wal-Mart to his managers. It was sent to me by an impassioned client who wanted to thank us for bringing the science of behavior into…

While banking is a numbers-driven profession, watching the numbers like a hawk and pouncing when employees fall short is not the best way to boost financial results. Instead of merely tracking…

About this time of year, leaders and managers begin the ritual, asking themselves, “Have I met my goals for the year? Have I used up my budget? Am I prepared to declare my needs and wants for…

Most organizations understand the value in promoting employee health and wellness.  Investments are made in wellness centers, gym memberships and weight loss programs.  Turns out there is…