9 Things Managers Do That Make Good Employees Quit Want your business to appear in Entrepreneur magazine? Tell us how you're empowering employees, and you could be selected for a full-page promotion provided by Colonial Life. It’s pretty incredible how often you hear managers complaining about their best employees leaving, and they really do have something to complain about—few things are as costly and disruptive as good people walking out the door. Managers tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun, while ignoring the crux of the matter: people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers. The sad thing is that this can easily be avoided. All that’s required is a new perspective and some extra effort on the manager’s part. First, we need to understand the nine worst things that managers do that send good people packing. Related: The 9 Worst Mistakes You Can Ever Make at Work 1. Nothing burns good employees out quite like overworking them. 2. 3. 4. 5. Good, hard-working employees want to work with like-minded professionals.
Use Storytelling to Explain Your Company’s Purpose The idea of “purpose” has swept the corporate world. Encouraged by evangelists like Simon Sinek, myriad firms like Nike, Adidas, Pepsi, and Coca-Cola are devoting real time and attention to explaining why they do. The idea of purpose was central to a book I co-authored. But activating purpose is impossible without storytelling, at both the corporate and individual levels. This is hard for most business leaders. I learned this lesson, most acutely, from Marshall Ganz, who teaches what he calls “public narrative” at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. To create a public narrative for your own organization, start with “self.” An excellent example of this is Steve Jobs’s address to the Stanford graduating class in 2005. The next step, “us,” aims to connect these values with broader shared values of the audience — clients or employees, for example. While it’s miles away from the battlefield of Agincourt, Burt’s Bees is a good example of how a business has applied this technique.
Accelerate! Perhaps the greatest challenge business leaders face today is how to stay competitive amid constant turbulence and disruption. Any company that has made it past the start-up stage is optimized for efficiency rather than for strategic agility—the ability to capitalize on opportunities and dodge threats with speed and assurance. I could give you 100 examples of companies that, like Borders and RIM, recognized the need for a big strategic move but couldn’t pull themselves together to make it and ended up sitting by as nimbler competitors ate their lunch. The examples always play out the same way: An organization that’s facing a real threat or eyeing a new opportunity tries—and fails—to cram through some sort of major transformation using a change process that worked in the past. But the old ways of setting and implementing strategy are failing us. We can’t keep up with the pace of change, let alone get ahead of it. What to do, then? The Limits of Hierarchy and Conventional Change Management
9 Things That Make Good Employees Quit | Dr. Travis Bradberry It’s pretty incredible how often you hear managers complaining about their best employees leaving, and they really do have something to complain about—few things are as costly and disruptive as good people walking out the door. Managers tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun, while ignoring the crux of the matter: people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers. The sad thing is that this can easily be avoided. All that’s required is a new perspective and some extra effort on the manager’s part. First, we need to understand the nine worst things that managers do that send good people packing. Nothing burns good employees out quite like overworking them. If you must increase how much work your talented employees are doing, you’d better increase their status as well. 2. It’s easy to underestimate the power of a pat on the back, especially with top performers who are intrinsically motivated. 4. Good, hard-working employees want to work with like-minded professionals.
engineering culture (part 1) | Spotify Labs Here’s part 1 of short animated video describing our engineering culture (here’s part 2). This is a journey in progress, not a journey completed, and there’s a lot of variation from squad to squad. So the stuff in the video isn’t all true for all squads all the time, but it appears to be mostly true for most squads most of the time :o) Here’s the whole drawing: (Tools used: Art Rage, Wacom Intuos 5 drawing tablet, and ScreenFlow) Here’s Part 2. Related Spotify engineering culture (part 2) Here's part 2 of the animated video describing our engineering culture. In "Labs" Squad Health Check model - visualizing what to improve (Download the cards & instructions as PDF or PPTX) (Translations of this article: Chinese, French) What is a squad health check model? Spotify Technology Career Steps This is part two of a three part series on how we created a technical career path for individuals at Spotify and what we learned in the process.
Building an Ecosystem of Higher Education Innovation | Rahul Choudaha, Ph.D. The confluence of cost and funding pressures, technology-enabled learning innovations and new paradigms of quality and teaching will continue to force higher education institutions to redefine their value. However, higher education institutions are unwilling to embrace new definitions of value and quality "as valid, even when they can see that customers increasingly prefer the new value offerings," notes a report from TIAA-CREF Institute. At its basic level, the innovation process focuses on "doing new things and doing existing things better," according to the European Commission's Study on Innovation in Higher Education. From operations management, we know that the design of the service or product drives its performance, as it influences the cost structures and delivery constraints. Outsiders accelerating the innovation All the recent innovations like adaptive learning, competency-based learning and MOOCs are putting pressure on institutions to define what learning is.
Virginia’s Public Colleges, Universities Gather to Share Innovations in Higher Education Representatives from Virginia’s two- and four-year public colleges and universities met Wednesday in Charlottesville to exchange ideas and share best practices about educational innovations, administrative efficiencies and redesigning services for higher quality. “Leading Change through Innovation and Collaboration,” held at the University of Virginia’s John Paul Jones Arena, showcased 85 poster exhibits, several panel and roundtable discussions and a keynote address from William “Brit” Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland. “We face daunting challenges requiring our institutions to be more innovative, flexible and nimble, while remaining true to the education and research mission that defines us,” Kirwan said. In the face of increasing demands for quality and productivity in higher education, the forum provided a space for institutions to share ideas and explore collaborative solutions to some of the most urgent challenges they face.
9 Interesting TED Talks on Breaking Bad Habits & Forming Better Ones Some habits, like brushing your teeth, you've done so many times that they feel automatic. In fact, it's probably true that every time you brush your teeth, you do so in pretty much the exact same way every time. Other habits, like exercising for even twenty minutes a day, can feel nearly impossible to pick up. But why? Why are some habits so easy to fall into, while others are so darn hard? And why are those "bad habits" so difficult to break? There's a lot of scientific and behavioral research out there about habits -- from creating new ones and breaking bad ones, to why some people find it harder than others to find motivation. Ready to form better habits? 1) Judson Brewer: "A Simple Way to Break a Habit" Length: 9 min. 24 sec. Why do we overeat, smoke, or give in to other cravings when we know they're bad for us? 2) Matt Cutts: "Try Something New For 30 Days" Length: 3 min. 27 sec. 3) Emily Balcetis: "Why Some People Find Exercise Harder Than Others" Length: 14 min. 8 sec.
The Next Dean of Stanford Business School The Next Dean of Stanford Business School To Provost John Etchemendy, professor Mary Barth, and members of the GSB search committee, My name is David Siegel. I understand that, since the resignation of dean Garth Saloner, you have the task of selecting the next dean of the GSB. You may be aware that I have been accepted as a candidate. This is my statement. Despite his current situation, Saloner put the school on a more agile footing. Business is on the edge of a precipice. This short essay will lay out the argument for change, propose a new framework that may help, and suggest an alternative way to design the school to meet the needs of the 21st century. Failure is the SystemAs an entrepreneur, I’ve spent about seventy percent of the last thirty years of my life trying things that haven’t worked. As Otis Brawley says in his book on medicine, “The System isn’t failing. The Value of an MBAThe MBA degree is now a commodity, little more than an expensive signal with no proven value.
How May I Help You? The Genius of the Reciprocity Ring There’s a very powerful exercise created by Wayne Baker at the University of Michigan and his wife Cheryl Baker at Humax Networks. What they do is they assume that there are actually a lot of people who would enjoy helping others but they don’t know what other people need. And at the same time there are other people who have requests that they would love to make but they don’t know where to go. The reciprocity ring is a solution to both of these problems. What you often do is bring a group of people together – it might be as few as eight or as many as 30. And you ask each person to make a request. I’ve seen some very diverse requests over the years. I think it’s a great opportunity for people to number one, figure out how they can act like givers because you actually get to see all these needs and requests and figure out how you can help.