Monthly Archives: August 2012

Creating Luck

Almost everyone believes in luck in one fashion or another.  As kids, we wear lucky socks for good luck in sports or use our lucky pencils on tests.  As young adults, we request that our friends wish us good luck … Continue reading

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Availability Heuristic

In order to decrease processing time and save energy, our brains use shortcuts.  Just as we determine the best way to travel between point A and B with the least amount of traffic and aggravation, our brains try to eliminate … Continue reading

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Should That Manager Stay or Go?

Standup comics, newspaper cartoons, and water cooler jokes use the woes of a bad boss as material on a regular basis.  An incompetent supervisor affects an organization in a number of ways. A previous posting summarized the impact that poor … Continue reading

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Incompetent Managers

Most of us have worked for managers that made us question how they kept a job much less landed a leadership position.  One of the most common mantras of employees everywhere is “let me tell you how bad my boss … Continue reading

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Right Sizing

Depending on the industry, the cost of salary and benefits absorb between 40 and 80 percent of total expenditures and holds the distinction of being the single largest annual expenditure.  As human resource professionals, we recognize that our greatest cost … Continue reading

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Gaining Input

Most management gurus discuss the importance of soliciting feedback from employees.  Employees provide an available and vocal resource for identifying organizational strengths and weaknesses, areas for potential innovation or improvement, and the state of morale.  Although each of these contributions … Continue reading

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Personal Networking: Making It Work

As we near conference season, a few readers sent me emails about how to create good networking opportunities.  Most of us recognize that networking plays a role in career success and even advocate something along the lines of “its who … Continue reading

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Olympics and Leadership

Most of us find ourselves drawn to watching the Olympics even if we never competed in sports or consider ourselves athletic.  The Olympics capture the best in human athleticism as well as the human spirit.  Around our office, excitement has … Continue reading

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Success with Results

Most of us as managers spend a considerable amount of time speculating and strategizing on how best to complete our team’s work in an efficient and effective manner.  Even the most experienced leaders spend considerable time examining how best to … Continue reading

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