Leadership

When your team is neck deep in work, the last thing on your mind as a small business owner is to encourage everyone to use up their vacation time. Every day looms as another day that you’ll have to find someone else to substitute for them or take on extra work. But that’s a short-term mindset. Employees who don’t take vacation are at high risk of burnout. And many workers do opt out. Project: Time Off, a national movement to transform American attitudes and behavior about vacation, found that in 2016, Americans took 16.2 days of the 21.9 days of vacation they were offered, on average. Project: Time Off calls this “America’s Lost Week.”   Take a stand against this trend of all work and little play. Here are five reasons to encourage your employees to take a vacation:  ...

Ray Kroc, who grew McDonald’s into the hugely successful global franchise it is today, famously said, “you’re only as good as the people you hire.” This belief is not a shock to any successful business leader—nobody can build a great company alone. The question is: how do you find these great employees? Here is a round up of the questions, attributes, and quirky tactics six of the most successful leaders use to tell if the person they are interviewing could be their next transformational hire:   Spanx founder Sara Blakely takes a step back and lets candidates ask the questions As the founder of Spanx and one of the world’s most influential businesswomen, Sara Blakely knows a thing or two about what it takes to make a great hire, especially when it comes to the execut...

Time tracking is a controversial topic. It evokes images of teams clocking in and out of a factory floor or being tethered to their desks for 60 hours a week. Of course, those scenarios are awful. I don't want to dismiss the very real ways that time tracking can become a horrible way to run a team, but I do want to tell you why I believe it should be used--and how. Before we get into the rationale, I want you to question your assumption that time tracking makes you a control freak or a micromanager. For a brief moment, let's imagine together an alternative way of looking at this, in which you have time tracking set up not because you don't value your team's time (and their ability to finish their days on time and have a life afterward), but because you do. Time tracking is the path t...

There are a few certainties around the end of the year in my business. People will complain endlessly about performance reviews - giving them, receiving them, and coordinating the whole process. Productivity generally takes a dive as people are more focused on their holiday plans and upcoming vacations (though there are ways to avoid it). It seems to be the most popular time of the year to fire people. Admittedly, this is purely anecdotal, but every year in December two things happen to me: I see a spike in people looking for help, saying. "I was just fired and I don't know what to do," and I see a spike in conversations I have with my clients who are fishing for reasons to fire people. The first two points are almost inevitable. But the third is one of my biggest pet peeves, b...

Here’s the thing - leadership and conflict go hand-in-hand. Leadership is a full-contact sport, and if you cannot or will not address conflict in a healthy, productive fashion, you should not be in a leadership role. From my perspective, the issues surrounding conflict resolution can be best summed-up by adhering to the following ethos; ”Don't fear conflict; embrace it - it's your job.” While you can try and avoid conflict (bad idea), you cannot escape conflict. The fact of the matter is conflict in the workplace is unavoidable. It will find you whether you look for it (good idea – more later) or not. The ability to recognize conflict, understand the nature of conflict, and to be able to bring swift and just resolution to conflict will serve you well as a leader – the inability to do so ma...