To significantly improve team performance, coaching offers a new role for today’s managers. Good coaching requires day to day engagement with employees to give assistance as needed.  Few managers do this well.  Behaviorists Evert and Selman have over 15 years of  study about organizational effectiveness. They argue that, “a management paradigm based on coaching can […]

When you’re the manager, it can be down-right difficult to get candid feedback from our employees. When you do you tap a potential often unrealized in you. However, often times critiques or compliments are coated with ulterior motives or filtered by fear. Your team doesn’t want to tell you something that might put them on […]

How do you get someone to follow you?  Most leaders rely on position power that comes with their job title. The presence and impact of Servant Leaders depends on their personal power.  Leadership through position power involves these strategies: Domination approach. Employees are subordinate. “Do as I say!” Fear strategies. The leader has all the […]

As I conducted a customer service seminar at the Mall of America, I had the idea to rate the mall’s stores to gain key customer service lessons. I had 45 participants, they were game, so I gave them the assignment to evaluate three different stores each over an extended lunch break. We mapped out a […]

The leadership training industry totals close to $400 billion in size. It is one of the most costly yet essentially underutilized tools in business globally. Most of the money spent is wasted and efforts fail because companies aren’t really committed to actually developing managers.  As a result, research by Gallup shows 82% of managers aren’t […]

Now here is a revolutionary idea: employees first? Aren’t they the greatest resource of a company? Isn’t it time companies and managers started thinking that way. I just had a comment yesterday from a manager that said, “Employees are nothing more than a cost of doing business.” What an archaic viewpoint. Multiple research suggests employees […]