Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Performance”
Everyone’s heard the phrase “a bad apple spoils the bunch,” but in my work experience, this hasn’t been true. In my experience, it isn’t the bad apple that spoils the bunch; it’s the semi-bad apple. That apple that you think is just as good as the rest (or pretty close), until you realize it’s not just as good, and that …
I read a quote last week that I would surely butcher if I tried to recall word-for-word, but the overall theme of the quote was this: People are not required to be constantly available to you, or you to them. And yet, there I sat at 8 AM on a Thursday morning with 57 notifications on my phone. By 7 …
I learned long ago that you should always be ready to take good advice — no matter where it comes from. This month, it came from a guy named Michael Dermer who touts himself in his blog and newsletter as The Lonely Entrepreneur. His words of wisdom were short, sweet, and spot-on. He said: “Turn off at a respectable time, …
I read a lot of HR stuff about high performers. We all want an entire population of these employees at our companies. Adding more high performers means better overall results, which means better everything, right? Maybe not. Depending on your culture, you could be making it hard for the best performers to stay. As Long As It Helps Me A …
Everybody has a story, maybe more than one, impacting your work life. A few years back while attending the SHRM National Conference in Orlando, Heather Abbott, a Boston Marathon bombing victim, gave a rousing 10-minute introduction to the conference. An HR executive whose life was dramatically altered after losing a leg in the tragic event. She has recovered, moved on, …
People are wired to work and make things happen. You may or may not like your job, but you are there to achieve things for your company. That is why you should hire more people who actually love their work. There are three types of workers. The “job” worker. This is the person who hates Mondays, lives for the weekends, …
From the world of unicorn employers (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.), our next great HR experiment has almost gone undetected. What is it!? The use of Economists to run employee performance management! A recent article talked about a new trend of tech companies (Amazon, Google, etc.) hiring hundreds of PhD Economists for all kinds of roles: For example, Amazon runs a program …
I started my own blog in 2006. Not an actual OG but very close. Heck, I used to use Typepad for chrissakes. That’s seriously old school. And some of (most of) my posts since that time have been about employee engagement. I know this because every time I’m up to write on Fistful of Talent I panic because I may …
Grace is a word not often used in a business context. It should probably be used more. And even less so, grace is not something we typically associate with firing someone, taking away someone’s source of financial security, involuntarily. But we should. Because when it comes to firing someone, grace on the part of the employer is what’s needed most. …
Recently, I was lucky enough to go to a private screening of a new documentary, “Pursuing Happiness.” The director, Adam Shell, shared wonderful stories of the people he interviewed in his attempt to find the happiest people in America. “Who is the happiest person you know?” was the question he and his production partner posed. My friend who hosted the …
