First released in 2015, Under the Hood: Fire Up and Fine-Tune Your Employee Culture by Stan Slap offers a message to leaders that is even more important in today’s work environment. Slap indicates that if you really want your business to operate at maximum performance, you need to understand the critical difference between your employees…
Dear Madeleine, I am a division leader for a family-owned manufacturing company. The family members have somewhat antiquated views and are not particularly socially sensitive. My challenge is how to respond to the pronouns I’m seeing on recent email. For example, I am now seeing She/Her or He/Him on email signatures and video conference meetings…
Constant change is a way of life in organizations today. How do managers and leaders cope with the barrage of changes that confront them daily as they attempt to keep their organizations adaptive and viable? Leaders often feel trapped in a lose-lose situation when they try to launch a change effort. On one hand, they…
Dear Madeleine, I am an executive vice president at a large, fast-moving communications company. I started here as an intern. I love this company, my job, and my team—but most of all, I love to work. I have been married 15 years and have four kids, ages 4-12. My husband has a great job with…
Dear Madeleine, I am at my limit and hope you can help. I am a senior team leader with a very high performing intact team. We have a new, very inexperienced board who is wreaking havoc with the way I run my business. They are putting nonrealistic pressures on me to generate numbers that are…
If someone asks my opinion about their organization making a shift to a coaching culture, I won’t say “think again, my friend”—but I will say “let’s think this through before you go spending a lot of money on consultants and a lot of time and energy rallying the troops.” Who am I to say anything?…
As we wrap up season one of the LeaderChat Podcast, Ken Blanchard and Chad Gordon revisit some of their favorite episodes. They share new thoughts about the important messages from our guests and invite you to send questions you would like Ken to answer in future episodes. Just send your questions to podcast@kenblanchard.com. Enjoy this…
Dear Madeleine, I work for the tax collector’s office at my local county tax agency. The bulk of my efforts go to facilitating change into that environment. I am a career-driven person and I am finding it very difficult to influence others. My job is under the umbrella of a state agency and I recently…
Dear Madeleine, I work in sales in a large medical device company. I kill my numbers and have been number one in my region for the last six quarters. I need your advice. My company continually makes errors in creating inventory of the devices we are selling. I just don’t think that I, in good…
In its simplest definition, culture is the way things get done in an organization. It’s about the behaviors and attitudes of employees and management and how that translates into different approaches to performance—both good and bad. If you are a leader looking to improve your organization’s current culture and work environment, here are five steps…