As an executive joining a new organization, you are expected to achieve a higher level of productivity within the first few months with a lower learning curve than other employees. Executives must be ready to make an immediate contribution once they’ve accepted their job offer. You can achieve this by knowing everything you can about the organization, its culture, your team, your executive colleagues, and the Bo...

Let’s face it. Hiring can be tough. The unemployment rate is low – just 3.8% according to the Department of Labor Statistics – and employers have to compete for good employees. So what can you do? Here are a few tactics to turn to in order to step up your recruiting and hiring success rate. Obtain Data from Exit Interviews A first step to creating successful recruiting, hiring and retention strat...

If you follow my blog, you know that one of my pet peeves is #LazyRecruiting and its cousin #LazyHiring. Lazy hiring/recruiting is rampant in any job market. When it’s an employer’s market, it takes the form of hiring companies kicking back, and having job seekers do all the work. In a candidate’s market, like we are in now, lazy hiring is represented by hiring companies that appear desperate to fill posit...

Every day we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. This information has led to some tremendous breakthroughs with the potential to improve thousands of lives. As leaders, we also have mountains of data available to us—honestly, more than we can assimilate or make sense of. Yet huge decisions are made every day based solely on the numbers. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love numbers! But, in my years working wit...

While Millennials in the workplace have dominated our thinking about generations for years, it’s time to acknowledge that they are no longer the “newbies” in the workplace — in fact, the oldest Millennials are now aged 38. So, while decoding the Millennial mindset is still an important part of the work I do as a multigenerational workplace speaker and consultant, much of my clients’ attenti...

When I was working in the corporate arena years ago, I had the great misfortune of reporting to and working with a number of extremely toxic colleagues and managers whose behavior hurt me and was also a complete mystery to me. I couldn’t understand their raging, their defensiveness, they inability to be challenged or questioned, or their penchant for drumming people out who were not obsequious and total “yes&rdq...

We live in an age of remarkable products and services from inventive thinkers with lofty ideas. These visionary leaders, who don’t think or work like anyone else, have started businesses based on novel concepts, and those whose achievements greatly impact society are afforded special status. Employees often flock to these visionaries’ companies, hoping the future will offer prosperity within a corporate cultu...

I once had a boss who informed me there was no such thing as company politics. At the time, I decided that depended on whether you were the person wielding power or influenced by it. I’d categorize self-serving antics, sabotaging behaviors, information hoarding, and artful manipulation under the heading of organizational politics. I’d throw in veiled threats, perpetuated mistruths, finger-pointing, and coerci...

There are few relationships as intimate in your working life as the one you create when you mentor someone. There are also few partnerships as fraught with peril or as likely to veer off course and lose their effectiveness for both of you. If you’re going to go to the trouble of finding a person you want to mentor and putting quality time into it, you really want to make sure it brings value to both parties. Here are...

For the first time in American history, there are five unique generations in our workforce: the Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Generation Xers, Millennials and the newly graduating Generation Zs. At some organizations, colleagues up to 50 years apart in age and work experience are working side by side. There are many areas in which the generations differ in their expectations and preferences in the workplace—comfor...