Tag: Productivity
Help your overwhelmed, stressed-out team
What the experts say As a leader, it’s your job to help your people find balance. Of course, you need results, but you also want...
The hard data on benevolence
The traditional paradigm just seems safer: be firm and a little distant from your employees. The people who work for you should respect you,...
What Maslow’s Hierarchy won’t tell you about motivation
Maslow’s idea that people are motivated by satisfying lower-level needs such as food, water, shelter, and security, before they can move on to being...
The marshmallow test for grownups
Children at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School, aged four to six, were placed in a room furnished only with a table and chair. A single...
The great divide
How should you relate to employees of different age groups? How do you motivate someone much older or much younger than you? And finally:...
5 habits of people with remarkable willpower
They have remarkable willpower not because they have more of it, but because they’ve learned how to best use what they have. Here’s how...
The relationship between anxiety and performance
It was just a middle-school tennis match against a manifestly worse player, but I became overwhelmed with anxiety. Before we’d started, the most important...
The hunt for lions
Building just such a team is a crucial in your company's ability to operate smoothly and navigate the changing business landscape while increasing productivity...
Coping with hurricane employees
The words describe employees--from CEOs down to mid-level managers and their subordinates--who tear through an office, disrupting everyone's work environment and leaving a path...
Polly wolly doodle all the day
Rather than being frowned upon, doodling should be actively encouraged in meetings because it improves our ability to pay attention, a British psychologist claims. A...
Six ways to grow your job
As one of my executive MBA students recently told me, "I know that I have to carve out more time to think strategically about...
Your company is only as good as your writing
We're great at inventing terms-the instruction manual for my toaster refers to the lever that pops up the toast as the "Extra-lift carriage control...
7 Employees you should promote now
Would your company recognize their unique strengths and put them on the fast track? Or would it try to assimilate them into the company...
Use temptation to strengthen willpower
And when the staff brought out big, thick, gooey, homemade cookies during a break, I was already so far outside my circle of guilt...
Don’t anesthetize your colleagues with bad writing
The most engaging communicators avoid trite expressions, whether in conversation or in writing. They use strong, simple words. Think of Winston Churchill's famous phrase...