by John Beeson
If you’ve been at your company for a few years and hope to move up to the next level, you may feel like you’re standing at an airport looking up to see one plane after another stacked up in a holding pattern. That’s because promotion rates in most industries have slowed dramatically since the recession, creating a backlog of talented employees intent on moving ahead. Continue reading
by Roger Schwarz
You are holding your weekly team leadership meeting. You are discussing with your direct reports how to handle the project delays that have caused the team to miss its quarterly numbers. You know that Ted — one of your direct reports — contributed to missing the numbers by missing two key deadlines. You’ve seen this kind of behavior before from Ted, and you’ve seen the team’s frustration with Ted. You decide to not say anything to Ted in the meeting, but afterward you privately tell him that how he’s letting you and the team down. Continue reading
by John Beeson
There’s a wonderful scene in The Odyssey when Odysseus prepares himself to steer his ship and his men past the treacherous Sirens, creatures who sing a seductive song that can lead a person astray. It’s a great moment in literature — and an extremely useful image for managers intent on ferreting out the feedback they need for career advancement. To prepare for his challenge, Odysseus orders his crew members to put wax in their ears, but to be able to hear the Sirens’ message, he leaves his own ears unplugged. But he asks his men to strap him to the ship’s mast to prevent him from recklessly heeding the Sirens’ call. Continue reading
by Tony Schwartz
For more than a decade now, I’ve struggled to define what fuels the most sustainably productive work environment — not just on behalf of the large corporate clients we serve, but also for my own employees at The Energy Project. Perhaps nothing I’ve uncovered is as important as trust.
Much as employers understandably hunger for one-size-fits-all policies and practices, what motivates human beings remains stubbornly complex, opaque, and difficult to unravel. Perhaps that’s why I felt so viscerally the shortsightedness and futility of Marissa Mayer’s decision to order Yahoo employees who had been working from home to move back to the office, and Hubert Joly’s to do the same at Best Buy. Continue reading
by Tony Schwartz
“I believe this is a very special moment in history, a kind of perfect storm. There is a growing recognition — to borrow language from AA — that our world has become unmanageable.” Those words have been reverberating in my head ever since Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, said them over the weekend during the Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco. She was introducing an iPhone app called “GPS for the Soul,” which is designed to measure heart rate variability as a window into your stress level at any given moment during the day. Continue reading
