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Harnessing Stress to Improve Your Employee Retention and Corporate Culture
"For leaders, understanding what motivates workers can help resolve workplace conflicts, empower staff and lead to better results as a team." - Deloitte LLP managing director Kim Christfort ~3 minute read~ The quote above comes from some major new research published by the major international consulting firm Deloitte LLP (you can read about it here). It was a big project, gathering the responses…
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TQT: Customer Service
Rehabilitating the DMV ~1 minute read~ I celebrated my 30th birthday recently, and in addition to coming to grips with that fact, my driver's license expired. So after a few days of rending garments and gnashing teeth, I had psyched myself up enough to head down to the DMV. Morning seemed like the best time to stop by, so I dropped in about 9 am and there were already at least a dozen people…
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A Few Tips to Improve Your Customer Service
People who walk away from your business with a negative impression will tell 4-5x as many people about their negative experience as your fans tell their friends about their awesome ones. Here's how to lower the number of upset customers. We're going to look at two scenarios that recently happened to me while I was dining out. Scenario #1: I celebrated my 30th birthday a few days ago, and…
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TQT: Hiring
~1 minute read~ This week's Tuesday quick read is about hiring. I recently read a good article from Liz Ryan, an HR expert and founder of the company HumanWorkplace. In it, she lists 5 'Red Flags' to watch for in your potential hires. The whole article is worth your time, but here's the one I want to focus on: "The candidate knows almost nothing about our business." This should cause…
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Change – How to Lead It, Manage It, and Do It - Vol. 3
Last Article in a Series by Pamper ~5 minute read~ As promised, the last article in this series will deal with how..…. Leaders become change champions. This term, I believe, was first coined by one of my leadership heroes, John Maxwell. However, the three points below that are crucial to becoming a change champion are my thoughts, based on many years of watching change in organizations and figuring…
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TQT: Principles and Objectivity
~Less than 1 min~ I would guess most of you have not heard the name Ray Dalio before. Dalio is the owner and founder of Bridgewater and Associates, one of the biggest investment management firms in the world. Dalio is one of 'those guys' - a certifiable genius, smart, out working everyone, systematic. A kind of reflective, Wall-Street philosopher. And when he founded Bridgewater, he founded…
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What Wilt Chamberlain's 100 Point Game Teaches Us About Good Ideas, Corporate Culture, and The Difficulty of Changing
~6-8 minute read~ On March 2nd, 1962, the sports world experienced something that it had never seen before and hasn't seen since. In Hershey, PA, the Philadelphia Warrior's Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points against the New York Knicks. 100 points. That is an incredible, unbelievable number. For perspective, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, the most dominant scorers of their respective generation,…
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TQT: Employee Retention
'Ninety-five percent of my assets drive out the gate every evening.' --Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS Institute (#6 Best Employer, 2016) The 'Tuesday Quick Thought' series will be recurring every Tuesday, and will feature a brief, thought-provoking article on a relevant topic. Check back each Tuesday for more! And don't forget to check out our regular content every Thursday! We hope you enjoy! ~1…
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Increasing Trust in Your Organization Through Assessments
If I told you there was a way you could gain more trust in your employees and the people you hire, would you be interested? Read on! ~ 3 minute read ~ I was checking out the app store the other day when I came across a game called 'Adventure Capitalism.' The title piqued my interest and it was a free download, so I decided to install it. Here's the gist of the game: you start with a lemonade stand…
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Improving Employee Retention: It's Important to Focus on the Right Areas
One area of organizational development that continues to challenge and demoralize leaders on a regular basis is employee retention. Despite a favorable hiring market (have you heard about all those millennials with college degrees?), many companies continue to have difficulty keeping their people from leaving. Statistics show that since 2010, 'quits' have been trending up year over year, with little…
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New '12 Driving Forces': Improve Morale, Corporate Culture, Productivity, Employee Retention, and More!
A great new tool to help you hire, manage, and develop your most important asset: your people. We always want to keep you updated on the products and resources we have available. Many of you are already familiar with our behavior assessment, the DISC. Created and distributed by Target Training International, widely recognized as a pioneering leader in professional development and the science of…
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Saigon, 1965 and the Case for a 3rd Party Perspective
As the Vietnam war began to escalate throughout 1965 and '66, the Department of Defense reached out to a California based consulting firm known as the RAND company, and tasked them to gather intelligence about the Viet Cong, the communist faction that had taken over Northern Vietnam. The result of their work was the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project (VCMMP), consisting of over 64,000 pages of…
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How the Corporate Culture at the State Department Contributed to Hillary Clinton's Email Server Problem
(A short disclaimer: it is always important to exercise caution when discussing political issues, especially in a heated election year. However, to fail to discuss such an important and noteworthy example of the importance of leadership and organizational culture simply because it is 'political' would be a mistake. This article is not an endorsement of either presidential candidate or party.) One…
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Jeff Bezos' Reality Distortion Field Around Corporate Culture
I experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance the other day when I watched a video of Jeff Bezos, the Founder and CEO of Amazon, talking about corporate culture with veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg at Recode's Code Conference. Earlier that same day I had seen an article talking about how awful Amazon's work culture was, how employees deal with burdensome conditions, low wages, long hours. So it…
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Change: How to Lead it, Manage it, and Do it - Vol. 2
As promised, this article will focus on why people resist change, which is the 2nd step in learning to LEAD CHANGE. Resistance to change is not new. There are many historical accounts of people attempting to lead change and others resisting it. The following come to mind: 1. For many years, most people believed that Aristotle was correct when he asserted that the heavier the object, the faster…