Tag Archives: Europe

Employee Training Needs More than a Script

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by Andy Molinsky

You want your employees to become more effective and emotionally intelligent communicators, savvier negotiators, more compassionate and effective deliverers of bad news, better coaches, and more sophisticated cross-cultural communicators. So you offer them interpersonal skills training. It’s a packaged solution that can pay great dividends for your business. Right?

Well, not so fast. Skills training is a huge industry, but also one with an equally huge failure rate. Companies spend billions of dollars annually helping their employees develop all sorts of interpersonal skills with questionable return on their investment. And the big question is, why? Why does training seem like such an obvious solution to a real problem when it doesn’t prove fruitful much of the time? Continue reading →

The Big Reason to Hire Superstar Employees Isn’t the Work They Do

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by Walter Frick

Most companies will tell you they want to hire and retain “A players”, and why not? It’s hard to object to building a company around the best possible talent. But what is it about superstar talent that actually improves performance? A recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research examines this question by looking at academic departments, where productivity can be measured in terms of papers published and citations from other researchers. Superstars were defined as academics who ranked above the 90th percentile based on citation-weighted publications. The paper points to three different ways that superstars can improve an organization, and measures the magnitude of each in the context of academic evolutionary biology departments. The first, and most obvious, is the direct increase in output that a superstar can have. Hire someone who can get a lot of great work done quickly and your organization will by definition be producing more great work. But, perhaps surprisingly, this represents only a small fraction of the change that superstars have on output. The authors write:

On average, department-level output increases by 54% after the arrival of a star. A significant fraction of the star effect is indirect: after removing the direct contribution of the star, department level output still increases by 48%. Continue reading →

8 Ways to Conquer Your Leadership Blind Spots

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By Bruna Martinuzzi

To be a successful leader or entrepreneur, we need to become intimate not only with our strengths but also with our blind spots, those aspects of our personality that can derail us. John C. Maxwell defines a blind spot as “an area in the lives of people in which they continually do not see themselves or their situation realistically.”

All of us have blind spots. A Hay Group study shows that the senior leaders in an organization are more likely to overrate themselves and to develop blind spots that can hinder their effectiveness as leaders. Another study by Development Dimensions International Inc. found that 89 percent of front-line leaders have at least one blind spot in their leadership skills. Continue reading →

5 Rules for Efficient, Effective Meetings

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by Kristine Kern

Despite their reputation as a huge time-suck, meetings are the laboratories of real, measurable teamwork. To reclaim productivity at your organization, try these strategies for making meetings meaningful again.

Meetings are a major pain point for many of my clients striving to achieve organizational health. The remedy, however, is not fewer meetings; it’s more regular and specific ones. Sounds fun, right? Let me explain. Continue reading →

Employees Who Feel Love Perform Better

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by Sigal Barsade and Olivia (Mandy) O’Neill

“Love” is a not word you often hear uttered in office hallways or conference rooms. And yet, it has a strong influence on workplace outcomes. The more love co-workers feel at work, the more engaged they are. (Note: Here we’re talking about “companionate love” which is far less intense than romantic love. Companionate love is based on warmth, affection, and connection rather than passion). It may not be surprising that those who perceive greater affection and caring from their colleagues perform better, but few managers focus on building an emotional culture. That’s a mistake. Continue reading →