Emotional Intelligence

It happens every time our country has a downturn in the economy. Training budgets get slashed. After more than three decades, I’ve seen it happen every time. The problem is that organizations inflict unseen damage on themselves by making the mistake of slashing training budgets.

. Everyone from the top down should be able to recite your company’s mission statement from memory. Managers, supervisors and leaders should talk about the bullet points in the statement in casual conversation. If top management eats, drinks and breathes the mission statement, everyone else will too. If management ignores your mission statement, so will everyone else

People often get promoted into supervisory positions and receive very little practical training to be effective in the role. That was a huge motivator for my writing “Creating Passion-Driven Teams.” Identify someone who thinks he or she has “arrived” and has no need to learn more, and I’ll point out someone who’s on the road to stagnation. 

A recent study showed some interesting numbers regarding social media at work. Apparently, 80 percent of workers use social media in some way in the workplace, but only 27 percent use it actively for their jobs. That said, fully 50...

We live in the age of expediency. We love our 10-minute oil changes, drive-through restaurants and microwave ovens. We want what we want, and we want it now. That works for some things, but when it comes to making changes in either ourselves or our companies, changes take time.

When you find yourself in hot water, what effect do you have on the environment? In other words, “What flavor is your management tea?”

Not long ago my company did some research on the importance of soft skills in middle managers. We surveyed frontline workers, middle managers, and senior managers at several facilities, each with an average of about 300 employees.

We hear it all the time: “If you can measure it, you can manage it.” Unfortunately, a danger exists in focusing only on numbers, as this philosophy ignores the intangibles of human nature. After all, it’s people that make a workplace function.

In 2001, researcher, consultant and author Jim Collins wrote a book titled, “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t.” I recommend this book as much today as I did 20 years ago, because Collins identified distinct...

If we’re going to be productive, being industrious right out of the gate is great because it sets the tone for the entire day.