Accountability for Others

Managers often ask how to hold their employees accountable. This is a difficult question to answer, because one of the biggest variables is your organizational culture. Some cultures support their people when it comes to accountability issues, while others cast blame.

If your culture is focused on learning and growth, you tend to tie accountability with learning and professional development. For example, if Sarah misses an important deadline, the manager will discuss what happened to create that result. Sarah may have had a good reason but didn’t communicate it ahead of time.

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Navigating Organizational Change

People often say that they welcome change, but you don’t need to dig too far below the surface to realize that many people actually resist it. They outwardly support change while internally fear how it will affect them.

This frequently occurs during an organizational or management change, which can be tricky. The new regime doesn’t do things the same way as the outgoing people. And nor should they!

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Random Acts of Kindness

Generosity is far more than a charitable donation you make or the amount of a birthday gift to a family member. Every day is an opportunity to be generous and to offer it in modest ways to enhance other people’s lives.

“That’s what I consider true generosity:
You give your all and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.”
– Simone de Beauvoir

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Do You Have a Strong Bench?

The OMICRON variant of COVID is hitting different parts of the country in waves. New York City, for example, has suffered quite a bit as the level of contagion has been higher and more aggressive than previous waves of the virus.

To illustrate, at the end of December a third of the New York City Fire Department was out on leave because of the volume of people who had contracted the virus.

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What’s the Alternative?

Leaders are faced with all sorts of decisions daily; some are innocuous, others significant. Most decisions are made primarily on autopilot. You’ve done something a million times, a similar situation arises, and you act on it quickly without giving it much thought.

Other decisions, however, take a lot more effort especially because they are out of your day-to-day comfort zone. This could be a decision to hire or fire a key employee or to embark on capital expenditures that are higher than you’ve authorized in the past.

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A Toast for the New Year!

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard this dozens of times in the past few weeks, “I can’t wait until this year is over.” It’s not surprising given our current environment.

What with the severely contagious Omicron variant crushing massive swaths of the population or rushing to complete year-end deadlines or worrying about inflation, challenges like these have accumulated quickly and definitively.

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What Does Your Team Really Think?

Without question, improving communication is a perennial workplace challenge. Although communication has always been an issue, it is amplified in this quasi-post-pandemic environment when you consider video meetings, adapting to new technology, managing priorities with limited information, and constant fatigue about the uncertainty ahead.

Layer on the fact that people’s attention span has diminished substantially, what with multitasking, email and text overload, and anxiety over not having enough time.

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Women and Burnout

Beginning in 2015, LeanIn.org and McKinsey have conducted annual comprehensive studies of women in the corporate workplace. The most recent report was just released and focused on the impact of the pandemic, issues of diversity and inclusion, and the overall state of work.

This column focuses specifically on their findings related to burnout, which has been continuing as a consequence of the pandemic.

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Does Your Company Have a Foundation of Trust?

I’ve been part of several conversations recently where trust issues have surfaced. Some have been positive, reflecting leaders who understand and embrace the benefits of a high trust culture. And others have swung to the other side of the spectrum where lack of trust is creating cracks in the organization.

Why is trust so important?

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Engagement, Appreciation and Growth

Continuing our theme of employee engagement, consider the correlation between engagement and appreciation. People want to be appreciated and acknowledged for a job well done. It isn’t a big leap to understand that when people are praised for their efforts, they are motivated to do more.

Leaders who feel that recognition merits only occasional effort miss the opportunity to enhance the employee experience. Make sure that you express appreciation in a sincere and well-meaning manner. Employees know immediately when someone is “scamming” them.

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