Deployment

Ever feel like your hard work has gone unnoticed? You’re not alone. Almost half of the full-time employees who responded to an Office Team survey said they would be “somewhat or very likely” to leave their current job if their manager didn’t recognize a job well done.

In today’s digital age, it's hard to focus. But the Not-Right-Now list can help you get things done.
Most people operate with To-Do lists. If you're like me, it seems as though that To-Do list never ends and you never check everything off of it.

Eric Jackson, a fellow Forbes blogger I follow and find both funny and astute, wrote a really spot-on post last month about why top talent leaves large corporations. He offered ten reasons, all of which I agreed with – and all of which I’ve seen played out again and again, over the course of 25 years of coaching and consulting.  The post was wildly popular – over 1.5 million views at this writing.

Unemployment has been high for far too long, and voluntary turnover has slowed to a crawl in just about every sector of the economy. So why are employers worried about a talent shortage?
That's the paradox Deloitte has been tracking since 2010 in its longitudinal survey series, "Talent Edge 2020." The latest report, released in January 2012, asked executives to list their three most pressing concerns about talent. The top concern for corporate leaders was brain drain--over 70% were highly concerned about retaining critical talent over the next year; two-thirds expressed the same concerns about high-potential employees.

Okay. Forgive the big word. Merriam-Webster defines exhortation as “language intended to incite or encourage.” In plain speak it’s about excited talk, passionate words, and loud barking. If we talk about our organization’s goals with enough energy we will create it – that’s the underlying belief of the exhortation approach to employee engagement.
The great search for ways to engage employees involves many well-intended but misguided approaches. Exhortation. Management by objectives. Tools and techniques. Over the next three posts I’ll explore each approach and reveal why they have very limited results.

 
An intentional mix of formal and informal learning strategies might be just what your company needs.

In the East, it is said that people who are yin are creative, passive, and easygoing. When they tend to lethargy, they are encouraged to become more yang. On the other hand, those who are yang are seen as active, precise, and controlled. They are nudged to strive toward yin. It is acceptable to never find balance between yin and yang, but instead to always seek, reflect, and add elements of the other.

 
Organizations invest billions annually on a success curriculum known as "leadership development," which ends up leaving so much on the table. Training and development programs almost universally focus factory-like on inputs and outputs — absorb curriculum, check a box; learn a skill, advance a rung; submit to assessment, fix a problem. Likewise, they leave too many people behind with an elite selection process that fast-tracks "hi-pos" and essentially discards the rest. And they leave most people cold with flavor of the month remedies, off sites, immersions, and excursions — which produce little more than a grim legacy of fat binders gathering dust on shelves.
What if, instead of stuffing people with curricula, models, and competencies, we focused on deepening their sense of purpose, expanding their capability to navigate difficulty and complexity, and enriching their emotional resilience?

Ok, so there might not much chance of raising salaries, says Jack Wiley. But there are other ways of keeping workers happy.
With pay deals across the UK at an all-time low, employees could be forgiven for lacking in motivation at the moment. But it’s not necessarily big money that they’re looking for. A 30-year research study has found that seven factors contribute to the engagement, commitment, retention and overall satisfaction of employees.

Companies Take to Training Staff, New Hires to Make Up for Low-Skilled Workers

• Faced with a dearth of skilled labor, more companies are taking employee education into their own hands.
  Unemployment figures are high, but finding workers with the right skills for the job—especially for highly specialized roles such as power plant technicians or laboratory chemists—remains a big challenge, many firms say. In a survey from Lloyd's, the British insurance concern, U.S. executives considered lack of skilled workers one of the greatest risks their companies faced in 2012, second only to loss of customers.
  So rather than wait for the perfect candidates to walk through the door, companies have decided to school their in-house staff or train new hires who may lack the exact skills they were looking for

 
The end of the year usually signifies a time when employees have their annual, or semi-annual, performance reviews. Some organizations provide these reviews in a more structured manner than others, but most successful companies agree that performance reviews, when implemented correctly, can help to improve employee motivation and performance, and thus, overall business performance. This is the reason why performance appraisals are often an essential element of a performance management strategy.
Delivering and receiving feedback are the key factors that determine whether performance reviews are effective. Effective feedback focuses on an employee’s unique needs, aligns employee goals with business goals and drives performance growth. Ineffective feedback is not structured, poorly communicated or misunderstood and can lead to employee disengagement. Gen Y is often plagued with the misconception that they are incapable of maturely delivering and gracefully receiving feedback. The best way to minimize these misconceptions is to develop and refine your ability to communicate and hear feedback early in your career.

 
Everyone has juicy boss stories, and I’m no exception. I’ve worked for a boss who didn’t seem to know my name, and another who sent me novel-long e-mails detailing her daily activities. (I knew way too much info about her housekeeper and her husband’s unsavory business partner.)
Learning by example can be the best teacher of being a boss. No matter how lovely your boss was, how quirky or how cruel, she had something to teach you—how to speak to a team, how not to speak to a team and a million things in between. From micro-managers to absent managers, all bosses have room to grow and to become better bosses.

 
Male sponsors are corporate heroes when it comes to advancing women into leadership roles, a recent Ernst & Young paper shows.
The business case for diversity in senior leadership has been proven repeatedly.
Research published by Catalyst, the Harvard Business Review and Columbia University, among others, has demonstrated the quantifiable correlation between senior women, financial performance and organizational health. The bottom line is having more women on the senior team generates tangible business benefits.
Corporate Canada’s growing understanding of the value of a strategy to support the advancement of non-traditional candidates, including women, is important for unlocking these benefits. And an increasing range of flextime options, mentoring and other programs to help women reach executive positions, might make you think we can jettison the idea of the glass ceiling forever.

 
Today we have a guest post from my colleague, Russell Raath, on an exciting youth leadership training program led by Kotter International.
There is an incredibly poignant moment depicted in the movie,Invictus, when Nelson Mandela, the president of South Africa, and Francois Pienaar, the captain of that nation’s rugby team, are seated in Mandela’s office, chatting over a cup of tea.