Tag: relationships
-
WHEN YOU DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING…
If you manage a team there is going to come a time when you need to have a conversation with one of your employees about their performance, or conduct, or both. How you handle that conversation is going to have a few important and lasting effects. It will definitely determine the relationship you have with…
-
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

It seems to me that much of the focus of HR in dealing with workplace issues is often punitive. It’s all about investigating incidents, collecting evidence, formulating allegations and searching for breaches of the code of conduct or xyz policy. It’s about hitting people with some sort of sanction for not following procedure, issuing a…
-
BOSSES BEHAVING BADLY
There is an interesting shift going on at the moment. More and more people are coming forward and reporting their bosses for bad behaviour.
-
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IS PROBABLY NOT THE PROBLEM

Many organisations conduct annual employee engagement surveys to track the level of ‘engagement’ in the workforce. The metrics will be based on a range of survey questions asking how people feel about their supervisor, their career development prospects, the recognition they get, the organisational mission, vision and values, and the performance of the executive team. …
-
DO WE NEED TO MEET OR IS AN EMAIL OK?

These days we tend to communicate online a lot of the time. Anyone with a young person in the family will know that the portable supercomputer they call a phone and keep on them at all times of day and night is NOT for making phone calls. It is for tweeting, snapping, gramming, TikTok, WhatsApp,…
-
ARE YOU TAKING HOSTAGES?

Do you know where Stockholm Syndrome comes from? In August 1973 a bank robbery at the Sveriges Kreditbank in Stockholm didn’t go as planned. The bank robbers held four employees hostage in the bank’s vault for six days. A weird thing happened over those six days. The hostages began to form a bond with their…
-
WHAT GOT YOU HERE…

A few years ago I was working with a CFO who had come to me for advice on how to deal with her direct reports. She felt that they were not meeting her expectations, that she had to closely monitor them and their work, that she couldn’t trust them to do it her way, that…
-
THE ART OF THE ‘DIFFICULT CONVERSATION’

As a manager you will have had occasions I’m sure where you knew you needed to have a chat with someone in your team but you just didn’t do it. These situations can pop up at any time and often we might let the opportunity to address the issue slide right by. Why do we…
-
HOW LONG IS TOO LONG IN THE ONE JOB?

One of the biggest issues for employees is “lack of career advancement” opportunities in their organisation. Almost every employee engagement survey will score poorly on this metric. Most people want to be able to progress and advance within their own organisation. It’s understandable, this is the place where they are building their expertise and technical…
