Hiring For Culture – The Bad

The bad?  But this blog often stresses the importance of values, guiding principles, and culture. Employees respond to working environments and shared goals.  What is “bad” about hiring for culture? The challenge For one thing, it is easier said than done.  A description of corporate culture is challenging enough for any business to achieve. People…

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2 Key Lessons From A Global Crisis

“Will our current self-isolation change business forever?” The question everybody is asking. People want to know if things will ever “get back to normal” and what life will look like when it does. Will it be a new normal? In two particular ways, we can hope that it will. One: Risk is real  The next…

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The Balance Of Work/Life Balance

When I say “work-life balance”, what do you think?  Employees: “boundaries from work and control over my time.” Employers: “my employees asking for more time off.” Who is right? They both are. And the conflict deepens when the business owner confronts her own work-life balance: “How can I justify the time off to read a…

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Effective Efficiency

We all want to be effective, and we all want to be efficient. Too often, these two qualities do not play well together.  To be more efficient, businesses cut resources and steps. Then, struggling to achieve results (i.e. seeing their effectiveness decrease), they throw money or time at the quickest fix available.  It is the…

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How To Run A New Team Meeting

After my recent series on internal business meetings, a reader asked me for advice on running a first, team-wide meeting.  This reader has a growing business and decided to start team-wide meetings from the new year, and his question is, quite simply: “Where do I start? How should I run my first and subsequent team…

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Employee Onboarding – A Success Story

“His work is always good quality, and yet every project is a struggle”.  My client was ready to bring a contractor on as a full time employee, but knew that something was still missing. The employee’s work was always good quality and done to standard. And yet… everything seemed to take longer than it should,…

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How To Write Your Meeting Agenda

Photo by Alice Achterhof on Unsplash

What are meetings? Meetings are about multiple people contributing to an idea, a question, or a decision.  Once you have determined your meeting topic and structure, you get everyone to the table… and then what? How do you make sure the conversation stays on topic, and that everybody is able to share new ideas? Enter:…

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What is a meeting

I would never write about what a thing is not, without clarifying what the thing is. Meetings are where information goes to grow.  Bringing two or more minds together is about producing a new idea that one mind on its own would not be able to create.  At the end of every meeting, each participant…

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What is (not) a meeting

Meetings: you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them, and you can barely live through most of them.  It saddens me that meetings have such a bad reputation these days, because they should be one of your most effective business tools. But meetings have been abused and overused for so long.  There has…

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When People Are The Problem

When I write about your team and employees, I talk about them as one of your greatest assets, and I focus on how to set them up for success. But that is not always how it goes, and I recently had a question from a concerned client asking what to do when an employee just,…

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