Bill Walsh: the 4 most powerful words

  • December 25, 2009

Legendary football coach Bill Walsh remembers that quarterbacks Joe Montana and Steve Young came to the San Francisco 49ers with supremely high expectations of...

Writing performance reviews: What NOT to say

  • December 23, 2009

Say you manage Kevin, a 55-year-old employee whose productivity drops over the year. Instead of citing specific, measurable examples of this decline in his performance...

Feynman’s theory on the Challenger disaster

  • December 01, 2009

While investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986, physicist Richard Feynman pondered what had caused a disconnect between managers and leaders that...

Managing a disrespectful employee

  • November 25, 2009

Question: “I am a fairly new manager. One of my employees thinks he knows everything and frequently talks back to me. Every morning, I have a short staff meeting,...

Same job, different pay: Is that legal?

  • November 23, 2009

Q. We have two employees who have the same job title, job description and functions. We pay one a flat salary ($120,000). We pay the other a base salary plus a fixed...

Learn to tell a 2-minute leadership story

  • November 20, 2009

The hallmark of a good leadership story? Inspiring, motivational, memorable and short—like, two minutes short. In the age of Twitter, people don’t have time...

8 keys to effective performance appraisal

  • November 13, 2009

It happens to every manager: You sit down to prepare a staff member's review and realize you can remember only what the person has done the past few weeks. Supervisors...

The 5 steps of progressive discipline

  • November 12, 2009

A progressive discipline system is a way to deal with employee performance problems. It's also the most reliable way to avoid wrongful termination charges.

A wandering mind leads to insight

  • October 18, 2009

Insight is so central to invention that legend has Archimedes, who suddenly realized how to calculate density and volume, jumping from his bath and running naked through...

Know what’s free speech, insubordination

  • September 20, 2009

Employees who work for government agencies have a few additional rights that privately employed workers don’t enjoy. One is the right to speak out on matters of...

Trouble holding a job? Here’s what to do

  • September 16, 2009

Question: “I have been fired from almost every job I have ever had. My friend says I’m just unlucky, because I seem to wind up in impossible situations that...