The hardest part of starting to track your performance is to just start. So, just start quick and dirty. It’s worth it — you’ll dramatically boost your odds of achieving your goals by spending 5 minutes setting up benchmarks. My…
Blog Archives
Four Steps to Faster, Better Strategic Planning
For ten years, Jill struggled to make a profit. At over $8 million in sales, her specialty call center should have been providing her with annual profits of 8-12% or between $640,000 and a million dollars. Instead she paid herself…
Three Strategy Insights for Small Business
Good strategy lets you outmaneuver your bigger competitors. Bad strategy can sink your business. Here are three insights you can use to harness strategic thinking and planning for your small business: Have a Strategy Kernel Build a complete strategy from…
Evaluating Staff Performance, Redux
It’s the end of Q4 and leaders are once more pondering staff performance evaluations. Most people evaluate too little too late. Here’s how you can get way, way ahead of the curve for 2013. As I’ve mentioned before, you’ll make…
How to Rise Above Circumstances
Dave was in a bind. His top architects were all idle because his drafters were behind on their work. Clients were going to get their plans late. Dave explained that his drafting department was a little short handed, and he…
How to Pick Good Metrics
For every leader who loves numbers, there is a skeptic. They both have points — without measures, we cannot tell how we are doing, yet many metrics seem arbitrary or measure the wrong thing. Meanwhile, often the right goals seem…
How to Get In and Out of the Weeds
Should you be a ‘big picture’ leader or should you ‘sweat the small stuff’? The best leaders do both — the real trick is to swap between the two regularly, without allowing yourself to become fooled. Take two business owners.…
Connecting Strategy to Workforce Management – Feb 17,2012
I interview Carl Hoffmann and Tim Ringo, authors of the new book “Calculating Success: How the New Workplace Analytics Will Revitalize Your Organization.” Carl Hoffmann is a former Partner and Vice President of IBMs Global Business Services group. Cur…
Motivate with The Progress Principle – Amabile and Kramer – Dec 12,2011
Managers are far more powerful than they realize, at affecting the performance of the people who work for and with them. New research by Toms guests, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, lay out three specific types of things we can do to boost performan…
Turnarounds and Revitalizing – with Bob Papes
Seasoned executive and turnaround expert Bob Papes discusses the timely lessons of his two books, “Turnaround” and “Management During an Economic Crisis.” (These are both out of print, unfortunately.) Bob has engineered five consecutive turnarounds of businesses in the $15…
Pay for Performance – from the C-suite to the Front Line
It’s vital that CEOs and business owners pay people what they are worth. Pay should be fair, and should combine (A) what the job market says a role is worth, and (B) each person’s actual results.
Pay for Performance systems are easy to get wrong — encouraging the wrong behaviors while creating uncertainty and resentment. Here, developed with the input of expert and turnaround CEO Bob Papes, are four steps to get them right.
Handling Breakdowns and Broken Promises
Just had a client ask about how to best handle a nagging problem — his people were loose and lax about keeping internal promises and hitting internal deadlines. I say “nagging problem” because it was bugging him, and he’d tried nagging his people — …
Management Rewired
The counter-intuitive nature of leadership and management has been a staple of contrarian authors for decades. These include Alfie Kohn’s “Punished by Rewards” and Richard Farson’s “Management of the Absurd” to name just two.Now, Charles Jacobs p…
Evaluating Staff Performance
It’s the end of Q1 and my clients are once more asking about staff performance evaluations.For some, it’s the 2009 evaluation that’s late. For others, it’s a quarterly review that’s on time. And for others, it’s being triggered by a recent …
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- On being Firm Thu 18-Apr-2013
- Six Steps to Solving a Problem Mon 15-Apr-2013
- The Changing Face of Luxury Sun 07-Apr-2013
- How to Harness Visual Leadership Sun 31-Mar-2013
- Stop Putting People First – Put Profit First Wed 27-Mar-2013
- Why your Employee is Always Right Tue 19-Mar-2013
- When is Anger Okay in the Work Place? Thu 14-Mar-2013
- Keep a Thin Skin Wed 27-Feb-2013
- Strategic Execution – Outside the Core Mon 18-Feb-2013