Tag Archives: teambuilding

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Relational Disconnectors Sabotage Themselves and Their Organizations

Here’s an interview of George Cloutier at American Management Services in The New York Times entitled “Fire Your Relatives. Scare Your Employees. And Stop Whining.” This guy is Howell Raines all over again. One of my favorite case studies of poor leadership is Ken Auletta’s magnificent article about Raines leadership as the executive editor of The New York Times entitled “The Howell Doctrine.”

Leaders like Cloutier always end up destroying their organizations like Raines did (he was eventually fired over the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal).  They may be successful at achieving “task excellence” for a time but eventually the failure to achieve “relationship excellence” sabotages task excellence.  As the legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “ability may get you to the top but it takes character to keep you there.”

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Your Corporation: Corpus or Corpse?

The root word of corporation is “corpus,” a Latin word meaning body. Does your corporation act like a healthy body where members support one another and recognize that harm to one is damaging to all. If not, perhaps your corporation is diseased with members harming one another through incivility or indifference. If so, your corporation is on its way to becoming a corpse (and its culture may be killing individual members, too).

Most corporations today are diseased. Corporate Executive Board research shows that 90 percent of employees today are either not engaged and giving their best efforts or they are not aligned with organizational goals. In this article that appeared this week in Hearst Newspapers entitled “Extinguising Employee Burnout” I spoke with reporter Scott Gargan about leadership, employee engagement, productivity and how to combat the growing problem of employee burnout that is literally draining the life out of individuals and organizations.

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Free Webinar: Re-energize Employees

BestPractices






Employees have been through a difficult season at work.  Layoffs, fewer resources and financial stress have taken a toll on employee enthusiasm, energy, engagement and alignment with their organization’s goals.  What should managers do to help employees recover, refocus and re-energize for the season ahead.  Jason Pankau and I are delighted to partner with the Best Practice Institute where we will be presenting a free hour-long webinar on the topic of re-energizing employees following the “Great Recession.”  The webinar will occur on July 14 at Noon EST. To read the webinar description and sign up:

  1. Click on this link
  2. Enter the Promo Code STPABP2 in on the right side (under the member sign-in box)
  3. You will be redirected to a page where you will need to enter information about yourself (i.e. your name, email and job position). After this page is filled out, you will be registered to watch the webinar for free!

This is a timely topic and we hope you will join us.

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    Employee Engagement: Beryl Companies


    One of my favorite business books is Paul Spiegelman’s Why Is Everyone Smiling?. Spiegelman is the CEO of Beryl Companies, a call center outsource company for the healthcare industry. On March 24-25 I’ll be moderating a session at the Conference Board’s Customer Experience Management Conference in New York City where Paul will be speaking. You can learn more about the conference at this link. And be sure to check out the above webcast I hosted with Paul.

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    Employee Engagement: Why Now, More Than Ever

    Reading this article in The New York Times about the mood in New Orleans now that its football team, the Saints, is in the Super Bowl, got me thinking about employee engagement.  The article identifies a factor that has boosted the morale of New Orleans residents. It is a factor that has a positive impact on employee morale, too. What is it?

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    Jobs, Apple: What’s at their Core?

    LiveMint/The Wall Street Journal in India asked me to comment on why Steve Jobs and Apple have been so successful. In an interview entitled “‘Think Different’ is What Makes Apple Stand Out,” I shared that it is more than the beauty and functional excellence of Apple’s products that make the firm so successful. Apple’s inspiring identity plays an important role too. (Above is a video of the original “Think Different” television ad.)

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    Employee Engagement Conversation w/Michael Bungay Stanier

    It was my good fortune to be a guest on Michael Bungay Stanier’s Great Work podcast interviews series to discuss employee engagement and leadership. Michael is the founder and Senior Partner of Box of Crayons, a firm that provides coaching and training services to organizations.  He authored the book Do More Great Work and writes the Great Work blog.  I find Michael so knowledgeable and interesting.  He was the 2006 Canadian Coach of the Year, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, holds a Masters of Philosophy from Oxford, and law and arts degrees with highest honors from the Australian National University. You can listen to our conversation at this link.

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    Open the Books, Boost Employee Engagement

    Employee engagement increases when a business opens its books and invites employees to contribute their opinions about how to improve performance.  Here’s a wonderful story entitled “A Reluctant Retailer Decides to Open Her Book,” by Jack Stack, one of the pioneers of open book management. Jack is a hero in my book.  Years ago he saved a business and many jobs by creating SRC Holdings from a division that was going to be shut down by its parent company.  You can read about it in a book I highly recommend entitled The Great Game of Business.

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    Employee Engagement: Resources for the Movement

    Here are resources I highly recommend to anyone who is interested in getting up to speed and understanding employee engagement as well as staying plugged-in to the emerging employee engagement marketplace of ideas.  I will continue to add to this post as I consider new resources and I encourage you to add resources you highly recommend to the comments section below.