Employee Retention: When Achieving True Success Means Letting Go

Employee Retention: When Achieving True Success Means Letting Go

The war for talent. The age-old battle waged by HR teams across the country, each vying to secure and retain the best people to help them achieve organizational success. The eternal effort to create systems, process, and benefits to help keep them once you’ve recruited them.

At the epicenter of the war for talent resides the tech industry, where many talented engineers and other highly-skilled workers have no problem jumping to another employer for a minor bump in pay or benefits. The result? Companies are forever trying to outshine each other with baubles, beer kegs and nap pods to try to entice this demographic to join them.

What this approach fails to do is inspire loyalty. Despite all the money that these companies pour into perks, at the end of the day, it’s just job hopping.

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This CEO Wants You to Know Bonuses Don’t Drive Performance

This CEO Wants You To Know Bonuses Don’t Drive Performance

Kris Duggan is the CEO of Betterworks, a software company based in Redwood City, CA, that provides customers with an enterprise platform dedicated to goal setting.

With around 200 enterprise clients and about two and a half years of road behind them, the start of Duggan’s latest venture had its roots in his experience as the CEO of a former business. He, like many other executives, was searching for a better way to engage his entire team in the goal setting and goal management process.

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A Survival Guide for Middle Managers (and the Zombie Apocalypse)

Stuck in the Middle With You: A Middle Manager’s Survival Guide

Early in your career, it’s the next rung of the ladder as you climb your way to CEO.

With more experience, it’s likely remembered as a pivotal time in your development as a leader.

Middle management positions have undoubtedly been a tough career milestone for many throughout the decades. These rising leaders are tasked with supervising the execution of the organizational strategy on a day-to-day basis.

Having to translate this strategy into tactical reality is a true leadership challenge, and no one knows the struggles more than those middle managers who are in the hot seat. They are forced to live with one foot on each side of the organizational dynamic, serving as the liaison between the big picture and actually getting things done. Read More…

How Great Leaders Manage Underperforming Teams

How Great Leaders Manage Underperforming Teams

Congratulations! You’ve earned a reputation as a highly effective leader. Now, your organization has thanked you by giving you a challenging new assignment that no one else can seem to figure out.

You’ve been assigned to lead a team that has a track record for underperforming, and it’s your mission to get things turned around.

Some may view this as being punished for a job well done. Others may take this as a true leadership challenge. An opportunity to have real impact on themselves, their team and their organization.

Whether you view it as a positive or negative, however, your job is to make it happen. So where do you start? Here are a few ideas to help design your approach to transforming this team from underperformers to superstars. Read More…

What Sports Can Teach Us About Building Better Teams

What Sports Can Teach Us About Building Better Teams

According to the Corporate Learning Factbook 2015, U.S. corporations reported a 10% increase in training expenditures last year, to $1,004 per employee. Included in this expenditure number is training in team building.

Given these huge sums of money that companies sink into team building exercises every year, why do these trainings have such difficulty sustaining effective outcomes? The answer may lie in the fact that team building and team training cannot be seen as a one-size-fits-all proposition. They must be specially tailored to fit the kind of team you are a part of. Instead of simply throwing money at more training, leaders of these organizations should be asking, “how can I tell what kind of team I’m on?” and “how can I build my team accordingly?”

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The Future of Performance Management is Not One-Size-Fits-All

The Future of Performance Management is Not One-Size-Fits-All

In 2013, CEB research found that 86% of organizations had recently made significant changes to their performance management system, or were planning to. In 2014, a Deloitte survey found that 58% percent of companies surveyed did not think performance management was an effective use of time, and many media outlets jumped on the opportunity to air their grievances.

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