In an organization, nothing starts a mad fit of eyerolling and quizzical looks among employees quite like management decrees. It's not unlike the images we have of royal decrees being issues in olden times. From atop his tower, the king stands before his subjects and issues proclamations that often have little positive bearing on their lives (e.g., your taxes will be increased because I want to fight a war in a land you've never heard of - or - this is your new queen, now bow down and worship her). But hey...he's the king and do any damn thing he likes because he's the king (including repressing the local peasants who disagree with his claim to allmighty power). Management decrees (oh alright, if it makes you feel better we'll call them "decisions") often come from the same thinking: "This is a good decision from my vantage point and employees will just need to accept it." These decisions don't need to be weighed against whether they make sense to the employee, whether they mesh with their day-to-day experience, whether they make their working lives easier. The employee is supposed to follow the orders because the individual proclaiming them is their king boss.

Earlier this week, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch managed to get his mitts on some rather juicy inside information from Google. Turns out that the tech darling isn't the career paradise that it's been made out to be. For all the gushing that us outsiders did over their innovative benefits and employment practices, perhaps it was all just hyperbole. There are some cautionary lessons to be extracted from this if you're not only on the hook for your organization's employer branding but employee engagement.

As a leader, do you expect faith from those who follow you? Do you reward that faith by continuously fulfilling the promise of things you say you’ll do? Or do you constantly expect your people to believe in you without doing the hard work of following through on commitments? Think hard about this because it’s [...]

This past week, I had a brief twitter dialogue with Shannon Seery Gude (@seerysm) who was wondering how to get teams to track their time spent on projects. For anyone who has ever had to track time, you know it can be a laborious and unsavory administrative task. And worse, it can be frustrating busy [...]

Managers, when it comes to your employees where does professional development rank in your list of priorities? A. It’s vitally important and I discuss it frequently B. It’s important but don’t talk about it much C. It’s not important – or – there are more important things to focus on If you answered ‘A’ above…congratulations! [...]

This weekend, I took Katie and Leah to one of the many local parks here in Austin. The brilliant thing about our city parks are the really neat playgrounds…and on weekends, there are always a gaggle of kids enjoying the freedom of playing. As I watched, it occurred to me (with a little help from [...]

Want to know the power of a system? Consider this…if you place a good manager within a bad system, they will founder nine times out of ten. Same goes for individuals; a bad system will dilute a superstar employee’s potential. Yet, how many times are we willing to give up on, demote, or release an [...]

A little while back at the Employee Engagement Network, David Zinger posed a question to the group about important engagement statistics. He writes: In an interview about the book StrengthsFinder 2.0 for the Gallup Management Journal, Tom Rath discussed the strong link between a leader’s focus and employee engagement. Here were the 3 powerful conclusions [...]

At first, I was just going to make a short comment at Ben Martin’s blog on his latest post concerning organizations and branding. Yet, the more I thought about it and started writing I realized this is a blog post in its own right. Putting aside the dialogue on marketing, the central theme of the [...]

Monty Python and the Holy Grail Chocolate and Peanut Butter Moe, Larry and Curly And so on, and so on… Each of these are fine on their own. However, when one is added to another, a great alchemical melding occurs. It’s the integration of unique things into something quite different. Too many times we limit [...]