Think.Blog

This past month we’ve talked all about the brain, emotions, and our natural and intense need to establish safe and secure relationships both at home and at work. For our last post in this series, I’m taking on an important topic when it comes to understanding behavior: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Motivation isn’t about inspirational…

Over the past few weeks we’ve touched on challenges all leaders face. Today I’m tackling an issue I’ve seen pop up over and over again lately (and one that we will continue to face!): how to lead a multigenerational workforce. I get questions about this from managers all the time. “How do I calibrate my leadership…

This month I’m taking on your biggest leadership challenges. Last week we discussed creating a retention strategy to keep your top performing employees. This week I’m touching on accountability, an issue that comes up frequently during my work with CEOs. Understanding to whom (or to what!) your employees feel accountable to will help you in…

This month I’m tackling the topic of leadership challenges. Leaders face challenges at every turn. Beyond the external challenges like increased competition, changing best practices, and new markets, leaders also face pressures inside the company  – everything from retaining your best employees to ensuring your entire senior leadership team models the values of your company….

Every company has a set of values that impact the daily behavior of employees. Company values can either be nice, inspirational words on the office wall with little to no impact on employees’ day to day, or they can represent the true embodiment of what a company culture stands for. Leaders that heed these four…

Do your employees exhibit low levels of trust and reliability? Do they produce poor quality work, attempt to evade responsibility, or make excuses for bad outcomes? If so, the problem goes beyond your employees – it’s time to step back and pay attention to your whole work culture. Widespread disengagement is a result of a dysfunctional culture in…

Every employment comes with a paycheck; it’s the very definition of a job. But as long as employees are fairly compensated, survey after survey shows that money is not one of the top workplace concerns. Far more impactful in today’s workplace are a number of workplace conditions that could be labeled as quality of life on…

The marketing guru Stan Phelps likes to say that it’s hard to see the label from inside the can. He’s talking about having perspective in a marketing sense, but the same holds true inside a company’s workplace. When things go wrong, it’s often senior leaders who are the last to know. Most organizations don’t set…

n his seminal 1989 study, The Iceberg of Ignorance, consultant Sidney Yoshida found that top management and middle management are aware of less than one-tenth of front-line problems, whereas supervisors are aware of three-quarters of them, and front-line employees know about all of them. This is probably not shocking to you. In many organizations, the lowest-paid…

How to Know When Your Company’s Problems Lie in Corporate Culture There is a pervasive feeling among your managers that their frontline employees aren’t invested in the company’s goals and objectives. Your office empties at 5:00 p.m. and doesn’t fill again until 9:00 a.m. the next day. People trickle into meetings five or ten minutes…

It’s well accepted in business that what gets measured gets done. Organizational leaders can talk all day about employee engagement, but measuring the organization’s progress brings into stark relief whether those efforts are working—providing a road map to what should come next. When an organization measures its employees’ engagement, it signals to the staff that…

A workplace in which employees are engaged without being accountable is unsustainable. Accountability is critical to any human operation in which work must get done efficiently, effectively, and within budget. More importantly, it also has a major impact on top performers and overall employee engagement. Consider a workplace environment where some employees are highly engaged…

Most of us want to work in organizations where we look forward to going to work and feel a sense of engagement in what we do and who we do it with. The challenge we are hearing from CEO’s across the country is “what is the best approach?” Satisfaction vs. Engagement What is the biggest mistake…

If you’ve ever attempted to motivate an employee by focusing on their faults and insinuating that their job was on the line, and then found that their performance deteriorated, or that they became defensive and angry, you have encountered the brain’s limbic system. The limbic system is the reason that employees who feel safe in…