The latest edition of HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” features a story about the “trophy culture” of youth sports—the awarding of a trophy to any child who participates in an organized athletic activity. Actually, “participates” is too stringent a standard in one Los Angeles youth soccer organization. According to the organization’s commissioner, anyone whose […]
The “Trophy Culture” of Employee Engagement Read More »
Too many leaders are abdicating their responsibility for actually rolling up their sleeves and doing the hard, slogging work it takes to ensure that their people are more highly engaged. Imagine if there were someone in a position to be able to say this—directly, unambiguously, fearlessly. Here’s what such a bold pronunciamento might sound like.
A Memo I’d Like to See From an HR VP Read More »
By reducing the Employee Engagement challenge to surveys and project management when it is really more a matter of institutional soulcraft, you run the risk of taking unearned comfort in the illusion of rigor: “This must be valid. There are many numbers, and many of those numbers have several decimal places!” You also run a serious–and
De-Humanizing Your “Human” Resources Read More »
There is currently a lot of enthusiasm for the concept of employee engagement. This is because of substantial amounts of credible research showing a strong positive correlation between higher engagement levels and better business results. Things like “research” and “business results” sound like solid, respectable things to deal with. But here’s the dirty little secret
The Dirty Little Secret About “Employee Engagement” Read More »
If you want a good demonstration in how not to lead served up in a convenient, 43-minute package, just watch an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen.
A 5- Star Master Class in How Not to Lead Read More »
To observe that Jim Kouzes has some insightful things to say about leadership is a bit like pointing out that the sun could teach us a thing or two about illumination. In his foreword to a new book on employee engagement, Jim packs a great deal of such insight into remarkably few words when he
A Bit More Humility Would Seem to Be in Order Read More »
Very broadly stated, business leaders have two categories of responsibilities to attend to: 1) the tangible, measurable-to-n-significant-digits hard stuff; and 2) the intangible, perhaps-measurable-but-only-by-proxy-at-best soft stuff. Most leaders are more comfortable working in category #1 since they also generally have a bias toward logical, rational, data-driven approaches to the issues at hand. I raise these
Coming to grips with “the intangibles” Read More »
