How do you motivate employees when your cash cow is low on milk—when there is no longer room in the budget for the usual financial incentives like pay raises and bonuses?
The answer is simple: Make work meaningful. Build on your people’s natural desire to see how their work fits in with the grand scheme of [...]
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The ROI on Meaningful Work
Is It Time to Kill the Myers-Briggs?
The question came from a guest lecture my colleagues and I gave last week to an undergrad Organizational Behavior class at Wharton. While I was there a fun debate erupted about why the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is still so widely used despite it’s extremely suspect validity statistics.
The argument against the Myers-Briggs is that it’s based [...]
Prime Your Mind for Action
In my last article, I explained why people who believe they control events in their life are such an asset to the companies they work for. Good leaders also wanted to know what about everyone else? How can they get other team members to adopt that same proactive mentality, even during anxious and uncertain times?
At [...]
What Employers Want
Do you have what employers want? That’s a tough question. After all, different jobs require different skills, different knowledge and different experience. It seems like there’s roughly half trillion answers to the question of “what employers want.”
But there is one thing that holds true across all jobs and industries. I just wrote an article for [...]
Was Jesus a Socialist?
Despite all the debating and politicking over the future of the American economy, hardly anybody seems to be asking the famed, and often parodied, question What Would Jesus Do? Why does Jesus gets so much press when discussing war, but not when talking about some of his favorite topics like sociology and economics?
I suppose you [...]
IS THERE REALLY A NARCISSISM EPIDEMIC?
Psychologists Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell think so. They are so convinced that they wrote a whole book about it.
But not everyone agrees. Richard Robins, director of the Personality, Self, and Emotion laboratory at the University of California, Davis is one of those dissenters. Robins told me that solid evidence for the alleged “epidemic” pretty [...]
Trophy Kid to Shot-Caller Rule #1: Speak Up without Talking Down
The one thing middle managers and executives alike from companies of all shapes and sizes agree on is that credibility comes from speaking up. Young employees have 2 fatally flawed tendencies that get in the way.
How to Go From Trophy Kid to Shot-Caller
Are you a Gen Y’er who wants flexibility and independence in your job? Want more meaningful work or a fat pay check? Branding, blogging, and social networking aren’t enough.
What the Founding Fathers REALLY Wanted
The tea parties have brought out a lot of heated debate about the role of government and biased media. As a devout centrist, I’m glad these debates are happenning b/c they are the best weapon against tyranny on either side.
I just want to clear the air on two arguments I’ve been hearing a lot lately:
1. DON’T SAY “THE FOUNDING FATHERS WANTED…”
A lot of intelligent [...]
Will Gen Y Be A Hero Generation?
Obviously, we’re in a crisis. Obviously, it sucks. But this might be just the crisis Gen Y has been groomed for…if not destined to overcome.
Nine years ago, in their book Millennials Rising Neil Howe and William Strauss argued that every 4 generations a “hero generation” is born. The last such generation of heroes [...]
The Impulse Factor
