What Position Do You Need? When starting a business, the leader or a family member often “handles the books” given the sensitive nature of the information and the minimal time required for this task when a company has few transactions to process. While the leader sees this work as mostly administrative, the value of the… Read more »
Business Management Blog
How to Craft Outstanding Interview Questions
One of the first steps in crafting good interview questions is knowing what you are looking for in a candidate and, of course, this is different for every company and every position. To illustrate how to craft great questions, we’ll assume one of the strengths we want to assess is the candidate’s problem-solving ability. Use… Read more »
The Onboarding Process
The goal of an employee onboarding process is to improve company productivity by quickly increasing a new employee’s effectiveness. The process begins the day the offer of employment is accepted and lasts until the end of the 90-day probationary period. Once the offer has been accepted, it becomes the manager’s job to ensure that the… Read more »
A Different Take on Employee Engagement
Gallup defines engaged employees as those who are involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their workplace. To find a way to measure this, Gallup studied tens of millions of people and determined that just 12 questions (the Gallup Q12) can provide effective metrics on employee engagement. Yes, engagement can be quantified and yes, you… Read more »
The Recognition Gap: Make Sure Your Team Feels Appreciated
The recognition gap is the space between the amount supervisors think they meaningfully recognize their employees’ accomplishments and the amount the employees perceive that recognition. Carolyn Wiley’s research reports that “while 80% of supervisors claim they frequently express appreciation to their subordinates, less than 20% of the employees report that their supervisors express appreciation more… Read more »
Five Not-So-Stressful Tips to Resolve Customer Complaints
While much has been said on how to avoid complaints from your customers, they will still happen. Assuming you’re a good person trying hard, being told you aren’t delivering takes your lizard brain from zero to sixty in a flash. You are under attack! Your heart starts pounding, blood flows from the extremities, you feel… Read more »
The Human Factors that Determine ROI on a Change Initiative
The goal of change is to deliver whatever the desired outcome was that precipitated the change. No company implements a new software system just to complete the implementation. Project management criteria such as on time or on budget are necessary but not sufficient for a successful change initiative. Companies implement software to realize financial gain,… Read more »
Communication: The Leader’s Role in Change Management
The goal of a communication plan (in change management) is to create awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement with each of the audiences that will be impacted by change. An effective communication plan builds awareness of the nature of the change and communicates the risks of not changing. It enables sponsors to interact with employees, formalizes feedback… Read more »
Building a Coalition: The Leader’s Role in Change Management
In our first article on the leader’s role in change management, we outlined the leader’s role in actively and visibly participating in change. The next role they play is in building a coalition of sponsorship, which involves finding the right people in positions of authority and proximity to implement the change. Note that leaders can never… Read more »
Active and Visible Participation: The Leader’s Role in Change Management
A company’s leader plays three primary roles in change management. Over the coming months we will unpack each of these roles in a series of blog posts. This post tackles the #1 contributor to the success of any change initiative, according to Prosci’s nine benchmarking studies conducted over 20 years: leadership’s active and visible participation…. Read more »