Recognition-Based Rewards: Best Practices for Rewards & Recognition Programs
Do your employees feel recognized? How do you reward top performers? These questions are crucial, as well-designed rewards and recognition programs yield significant benefits. According to a Gallup/Workhuman poll, employees who receive authentic recognition are 5x more likely to see a clear path for growth. This clarity reduces anxiety and boosts engagement. For MSPs, this […]
Reflections and Resolutions
As the year comes to a close, December 31 offers a unique opportunity for reflection and anticipation. As a leadership trainer, I encourage leaders to use this final day to assess the past year, celebrate achievements, and set intentions for the year ahead. Let’s explore how December 31 can serve as a valuable time for […]
2025 Planning
Most of us are well into our planning for 2025 at this point in the year. This is a good opportunity to talk a bit about the strategic planning process. Set a Long Range Vision At the highest level of strategic planning, is the long-range vision for the company. I talked a bit about vision […]
Building a Future-Ready Workforce: Leadership Lessons for 2025 and Beyond
As we reflect on 2024, the workplace landscape continued to evolve rapidly, shaped by emerging technologies, shifting market dynamics, and changing employee expectations. Insights from a recent survey highlighted the key skills employees and employers believed were essential for success in the next three years. Leaders who recognized these trends and adapted their strategies laid […]
Mastering Meetings
As leaders, we all spend a substantial amount of our time in meetings. While it might be nice to eliminate meetings altogether, that’s not going to be possible, so the next best thing is to master meetings. Mastering meetings comes down to having a few core principles. The Meeting Must Have a Purpose Every meeting […]
Difficult Conversations Made Easy
The most difficult part of performance management is talking about it. In my recent articles I’ve covered a fair bit of ground on the topic of scorecards and performance management, mainly from an operational perspective. But something of a wild card in this process is the actual performance management conversation. As with anything else in […]
Mastering Performance Management
The past couple of weeks I’ve talked about scorecards, and the role that they play in aligning individual contributions to the overall strategy. But scorecards serve another purpose – to provide an unbiased view of individual performance. When scorecards are rooted in objective measures, you can see where an employee is performing well, and where […]
Balanced Scorecards
Last week, we discussed the role that scorecards can play in performance management. This week, we’ll talk about the balanced scorecard concept. The idea of the balanced scorecard was created in the early 90s by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, to help solve the challenge of measuring business results. In particular, they were looking for […]
How to Use Scorecards to Align Actions with Goals
I wrote last week that goals are set to help align the behavior of teams or individuals towards the overall organizational mission (read the previous post here). When goals are aligned with the mission, everybody on your team will be working in the same direction – their actions which meet their goals, will support the […]
Mission, Vision and Goals
Organizations are inherently functional in nature. They’re comprised of individuals, each one performing functions, and the performance of functions leads to outcomes. There is no guarantee, however, that these outcomes are the ones that the organization’s leadership intended. To deliver intended results requires structure, and the framework of that structure starts with mission and vision, […]