Leaders & Managers

To excel, fill your business with “good citizens” who go beyond duty to help each other and the organization. The key to growing good citizens? Autonomy.

Perhaps the biggest reason why Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler was pushed out of his job last year was that he trusted the wrong person to serve as the HR director. Here are five signs that an HR chief is trouble—and they’re not just unique to Pfizer:

Country music singer-songwriter Kenny Chesney has 120 employees on the road with him every day, so he can’t afford to fool around. On managing: He says, “I’m not that great with confrontation. But once I started to be OK with that, the better everybody’s life got ... If you don’t clear the air, with that many people together on the road, it can be just a mess. I think it’s helped me as a person."

With the increasing volume of work that everyone expects to get done, more of my clients are asking for help on improving their delegation skills. Based on the best practices of leaders who are really excellent at delegation, I’ve come up with a five-step approach called TRACK.

Here are some flags that your governing board may be overwhelmed:

A study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior points out that companies investing in knowledge-transfer software aren’t seeing much improvement in their information flow. One reason: Employees simply won’t share what they know. Keep information flowing in your corridors with these tactics:

Just as communication at the beginning of a marriage can indicate if it will end in divorce, the foundation established early on with a new hire is crucial to productivity, engagement and retention. Onboarding programs yield the best results if they cover these five areas: clarification, connection, culture, compliance and check back.

At work, numbers speak volumes. If you can’t show, quantitatively, that something is improving, then how can you really know it’s improving? It’s not surprising, then, that more admins are being asked to set SMART goals—specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely goals—to be evaluated against.

Nestlé CEO Paul Bulcke is a quiet guy, the engineer father of two engineer sons who describes his family as “boring.” He loves working behind the scenes. Most of his career has been spent simplifying processes, building teams and slowly scaling the ranks in Latin American obscurity. For Nestlé, this was perfect.

You probably didn’t know that in 1937, a horse fell on musical genius Cole Porter, crushing both his legs. He was 46 years old. Through 35 operations and chronic pain, he retained a keen sense of humor and found inspiration everywhere.