At age thirteen I was led to an epiphany. The year was 1976, and this is my story – – I was an eighth grader, rocking a pair of light blue converse all-stars, the perfect afro, and living large at Canterbury Jr. High School. That was the year of my (to this day) most infamous encounter with Clifford, a classmate and neighbor, who by that time …
The Ultimate Answer to Employee Engagement is Self-Direction
I’m not going to do my usual screed on why employee engagement is a Sisyphean effort, and almost every intervention is at best a short-term fix to a long-term problem. I believe 90% of the interventions we talk about are like handing out sandwiches to starving people and thinking you’ve fixed their food-acquisition problem. Employee engagement has never been a …
The One Thing It Takes to Be a Real Manager
Although it pains me to say it, I’m somewhat of an expert on passive-aggressive behavior. The good people at Wikipedia describe passive-aggressive behavior as follows: The indirect expression of hostility, such as through procrastination, stubbornness, sullen behavior, or deliberate or repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible. That’s a good definition, but Urban Dictionary gets …
True Sign of a Great Leader > How Well They Protect PTO
To me, there is one way to know if a leader is worth their salt. It is something I don’t recall seeing in leadership books, white papers, or in training sessions. To me the simplest way to see if a leader is doing their job is to ask team members one question: “Did you use all your PTO last year?” …
Can You Be Selfless & Lead A Culture Of Engagement? No.
I’m not a great Catholic; decent I’d say. Decent enough to go to Ash Wednesday service after several months’ absence. Better late than never. I was inspired by the sermon, which gave the congregation some perspective on Lent, including how to personally reflect over this time. The sermon also touched on themes of forgiveness and selflessness. The sermon got …
Is Your HR Department a HR Center of Excellence? Find out!
Today at FOT I get to announce a new sponsor, Paycor, and I get to announce to our audience something really cool that Paycor is doing with the launch of their HR Center of Excellence (HR COE) site! It’s a must-see for sure! Paycor has 30,000+ SMB companies they work with and they were able to bring all of this …
You Already Have AI in Your Company – Time to Energize It!
This post will be both intellectually deep and shallow. It will follow the rules of the quantum world – it will take both paths simultaneously – blog quantum superposition if you will. It will be intellectually deep because I’m pulling from a piece that was posted recently on the Edge.org which describes its mission as: “To arrive at the edge …
Tesla Fired Hundreds….To “Improve Morale”
When you geek out on talent like the folks here at FOT, it’s fun to sit back and watch high profile companies make big talent decisions. Intrigue, strategy and risk are all embedded in public leadership transitions, succession planning, business strategy pivots, acquisitions, mass firings….wait, what? Mass firings? Who announces those and makes them public? Well, Tesla does. Backstory intro …
It’s Only a Matter of Time Until You Hire a Digital Employee – What Does that Mean for Your “Analog” Employees?
CMS Wire recently posted an article titled, Ready or Not, Here Come the ‘Digital Employees’. It was the term ‘Digital Employees’ that caught my attention in the article’s title. HR has been talking about the dreaded artificial intelligence takeover since someone put the letters ‘A’ and ‘I’ next to each other, but never had I actually heard A.I. for the workplace …
RANT: Stop Being Weak When Announcing Resignations…
Ah yes. The voluntary resignation. Of a good person. Or maybe just an OK person. We love to wring our hands – both inside and outside HR – about the best way to communicate a resignation to the rest of a team, department or location inside a company. We have to communicate something so people don’t panic. “It is with …